


“Erinaceus Carnivorous”

by Sexsuna



Category: E'm~grief~, Jrock, MerCurius (Band)
Genre: Alien autopsy, Aliens, Animal horror, Blood, Drama, Extra-terrestrials, Gen, Gore, Horror, Killer Animals, Killer critters, M/M, Man-eating hedgehogs, Massacre, Monsters, Original Characters - Freeform, Pulp Science Fiction, Science Fiction, Space themes, Visual Kei, biological horror, meteorites
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-21
Updated: 2015-02-21
Packaged: 2018-03-14 11:03:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 17
Words: 28,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3408182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sexsuna/pseuds/Sexsuna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As Nema visits his family home, certain peculiar events unfold after a meteorite is observed one night...<br/>(2011)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

THE BUS ROUNDED A CURVE and vanished into the orange womb of a tunnel; outside the windows, the concrete supports flashing by, lit by the low-pressurised sodium fixtures; the roar of the bus so much louder now that the sounds bounced off the tunnel walls like a drugged army of rabbits. Yes, he could even picture it in his head, in his mind’s eye; the army of rabbits with guns and military-green uniforms with hilariously large medals flopping with each jump; their red eyes glowing like an infernal congregation of daemons. Nema brought up his mobile phone from his rugged khaki backpack, a last remnant of older days; indeed his mother had given it unto him on his birthday some eleven years ago. It was surprising it still held together. One or two seams had ripped, but with some diligent work, he had managed to sew it back together. At any rate, he flipped up his mobile phone and checked the time; clock read 19:21. No new messages. Good, he thought, reclining against the window and stuffing the mobile back down in his bag.

Then the bus emerged from the tunnel into the spectacular sunset, the valley visible before him as it begun the arduous journey down towards Chichibu; against a spectral backdrop of mountains, the town filled the valley like an accidental spill, like old yoghurt just randomly squirted over what little flat land could be found in the area. Just an accident. Down there, the chimney and massive complex of the big Taiheiyo Cement Works, and beyond that, the outskirts of the city and the surrounding villages, and Nema dozed off into a world of nostalgic reminiscence, recalling the day he and two friends from elementary school had snuck over the fence late and wandered around the cement plant complex. It had been a frightening experience, the enormous warehouse buildings, and the cisterns, those threatening monstrosities, and the chimneys like pinnacles into the sky, the pens with which the Gods type in smoky lettering. The rats, the place was crawling with rats, feeding off some pet food stored in one of the warehouses leased out as storage space, big ones, enormous, a foot or more.

They found a few rakes stored away in a corner of the warehouse building that had the door open. Apparently, there wasn’t much of security, but then again, who would break into a cement plant anyway? With the rakes they chased the monstrous rats away, and they found there the nest, crawling with hairless newborn rats, squeaking and biting at everything and nothing like rabid dogs. At least, that is how it appeared in his memory. There was no way to be sure, Nema thought, that his memory accurately reflected the true events as had occurred that fearful day. At any rate, the sight which greeted them was too much, young as they were, they put their legs to work and ran as fast as they could from the place, even taking the shortcut through the graveyard right next to the cement plant. For weeks, Nema woke up wet with sweat, feeling like he had been to Antarctica and back, his scalp, his bed sheets, all wet; and of his nightmares the only fragment that remained was the squeaking and squealing of those damned rat babies, perfectly naked bar those occasional long pale hairs, straddling the folds of their reddish bumpy skin, like the lonely strands of hair on an old man’s scalp.

In this nightmarish and uncomfortable recollection Nema was immersed when the bus finally came to a halt at the central regional train and bus station, where all long-distance buses stopped. Nema took his bag and walked on out, there had been only three or four other people on the bus, and they did not seem to be going off here. The angry-looking bus driver with tired eyes mumbled to himself – presumably about degenerate youth – as he left the bus; the city was in the shadow of the mountain, a fresh cold breeze caressed his face with the dedication of a passionate lover.

 

With the backpack on his back, he began the long walk to the house of his parents. There were not many people out; most stores had closed already, indeed save the few cars visible on the major thoroughfare to the east, the only person he could see was a drunk trying to get a pack of cigarettes out of a vending machine. He walked up a slight slope, past the school he had once been attending, rounded a few corners onto narrow homely streets, and all around him this eerie nostalgia was present, olfactory as well as visual. Contradictory feelings were conjured up; he felt at home, yet not at home; a stranger returning to what-once-was, like returning from the dead or an unexplained multi-year trip around the planet. Memories of younger days, simpler days, flashed by inside his head as he walked alone through the darkening evening with the streetlights flickering on. Things were always so much more comforting when one recalled the past; the now had always been and would always remain a terrible uncharted territory populated by unseen slimy horrors.

 

At last, he came upon the house of his parents, where he had grown up, where he for thousands of nights had dwelt dreaming of the other, the escape from that which was here, the escape to the teeming canyons betwixt the towers, amongst the ants of the giant ant hill known as Tokyo; anonymous at last, avoiding finally the x-ray stares of the people around him, stares as brutal as the most sadistic serial killer.

  
The lights were on inside, and for a little while he simply stood peering in through the window; his mother and father unaware of his presence, preparing a meal; and the beauty of it all, the world around him, the nostalgic recollections, the memories good and bad, combined into a miasma of visions that brought tears to his eyes. Summer evenings often strangely affected his mood, a fact he had almost forgotten during the stressful years he had been gone from here. Eventually he gathered the courage to walk the last few steps to the door. With graceful moves, he knocked on the door, a patient and subtle knocking.


	2. Chapter 2

IT WAS HARD TO FALL ASLEEP. It was quiet out here, too quiet. However, that was not really the problem. It was the thoughts. The silence was not noticeable to him anyway, sitting in his old boyhood room with the TV on, the faint murmur and flashing light of nightly reruns and the shouting of nonsensical advertisements; but the memories and thoughts, they were hard to escape. 

Upon his arrival, he had been offered to sit down and eat. At the table, his parents began asking all sorts of uncomfortable probing questions, curious as to what he had been up to. The last few years had flown by quickly, and somehow he had eventually come to have no ties to home anymore. He hadn’t even called, or for that matter gotten any calls from, his parents. Understandably, they were curious. Their questions were not very easy to answer, however. What should he tell them, just how much was necessary and how much was enough, what would disappoint them and what would not? Did they want the whole truth or simply something casual, something that went down easy like a bar of chocolate, like ice cream on a warm summer day? He had excused himself after dinner, saying he would need to sleep some after the travelling – blaming it on a gig in Osaka the day before – while his parents sat down to watch TV and drink tea. And he had really been quite exhausted! Yet… sleep did not come quick to such an uneasy mind. 

Time passed, his parents went to bed, and he simply studied the dusty spots on the ceiling. His old bed was still around, but most of the room was filled with old boxes, the bike he had been gifted on his fourteenth birthday, and on his old desk, the thing that made him even more uneasy to tread this familiar unfamiliar zone: an old diary. Just seeing his own signature on the cover, coated with dust – his parents must have been lazy when it came to cleaning this new storage room – made him acquire the tomato-hue of great embarrassment. 

 

At some point, he drifted into a state of shallow sleep. He dreamt about walking down a hallway in what he instinctively knew was his former school, a cold empty corridor, at night, the only illumination the moonlight seeping through the windows and the green glow from the emergency exit sign above the big doors at the very end of the corridor. There was something else, he was not alone; something was moving in one of the rooms to his right, in the pitch-black void which during daytime would have been the school cafeteria. Someone was breathing loudly, as though breathing was difficult, a hard task the likes of digging a grave with a rusty shovel. Images flashed by, shovel in hand, underneath the moon, digging a hole in an empty plot on a muddy cemetery. Dead leaves falling from the trees. The barks of a dog in the funeral home the day of his grandmothers wake. Then, it hit him what that breathing was. 

And just as he recalled, from the shadows emerged into the corridor the monstrous shape of something unnatural, something evil; with glowing red eyes it lurched like a sloth; a hairy man-like creature with ape-like physique: it was none other than his old biology teacher, Mr. Koizumi, that old fart with his flabby lips and that large face full of curiously large liver spots. At the same time, something was clearly off; he had what was no doubt a thick brown fur covering all of his body – at least the parts that weren’t hidden by the shreds of his black and white office suit he always wore – and Nema knew that if he didn’t start running soon, that monster would tear him to shreds. 

Upon this realisation, he darted off towards the main entrance to be found in the end of the long hallway, that seemed to extend and grow longer as he ran, leaving the walls on his side a dull blur. Eventually, he made his way out the doors, but kept on running across the schoolyard and up a small mound across the street in a small district park. There was a small gazebo perched at the very top, offering a nice outlook over the surrounding vistas; the schoolyard, the houses, and the distant chimneys of the old cement factory, and above it all the magnificent lunar lamp spreading its eerie glow upon the world. As a bird made its way across the skybox, there came a tremendous roar from the sky; and into view came with extreme speed what could be nothing other than a fighter jet. 

The two afterburner were visible like two blue dots as they disappeared into the distance; then turning back again, and the roar constantly gaining volume, the earth was finally shaking—

 

He woke up with a bad sweat, ready to jump out of the bed. The room was empty, and nothing was awry as far as he could see, the greenish tint of the streetlight seeping in through the window from the small balcony facing the street. He wondered what it was that had awoken him. The recollection of his dream became clear, and just as he pondered the meaning and significance of that seemingly random collection of semi-nostalgic warped memories, that terrible roar once again resumed. Was he still dreaming? 

 

The window soon began to shudder from the noise, and he wondered what it was; he opened the door and walked on out on the balcony. From there, he had a nice view of the rooftops dispersed all over the valley, and to the west the cement factory – visible from everywhere in town. Then he caught a glimpse of whatever was causing that noise, a radiant object in the night sky, moving faster and faster with a trail of shining marbles in pursuit. No doubt, a meteor, he realised; and from the perceived increase in speed and size, there was little doubt it was coming closer to ground. Strange noises, the serenade of New Year’s fireworks echoed over the valley, and sparks shot out from the glowing globule. 

It hit the ground with a loud dull thud that echoed between the mountains, somewhere on the mountains on the opposite side of the valley, disappearing into the thick canopy of trees and bushes crowding the steep slopes he remember from younger years as being terribly difficult to climb. The lights were on in the house across the street, and he could hear the sound of windows opening somewhere he could not see; maybe someone else had also seen the space rock, or were at least wondering just where the hell that deafening clamour had come from. Millions of miles across the gulfs of space only to be obliterated in a burst of flames as it slammed into the ground. Every day some 45 tons of space debris landed on earth, rocks, dust, all sorts of things from the vacuous voids – was it not also theorised that this was a possible way in which organic cells or whatever seeds of life had come to the planet? Objects constantly bombarded the early earth day and night in those days, indeed was not the moon wrought from the molten rock of Tellus following a cataclysmic collision?

Tomorrow, he decided, he must go up the mountain and try to locate the impact site. But now… was not the time. He turned around and walked back into his room and closed the glass door to shut out the night cold. For roughly half an hour thereafter he sat on his bed thinking about what had happened, feeling too restless and excited to sleep. He was one of few people who had seen a bolide at such a close distance, and it did fascinate him: all the rocks and mysteries out in the great big darkness… humanity and her feeble attempts at systematisation of the world around her so puny in comparison to the expanses of the extraterrestrial wastes. Not long after lying down, he fell asleep.


	3. Chapter 3

THE THERMOS WAS WARM and smooth, and inside the car parked on the lay-by along the National Road 299, off the bridge over the river just by the intersection with Prefectural road 44, north-west of Chichibu, tonight – two months from retirement – it was the only thing that kept Yasuhiro Nakasone, a local police officer, from freezing to death; at least in the metaphorical sense. Not even a full week ago his wife had decided that their relationship was unfulfilling – he had the night shift, so had to sleep most of the days and was rarely at home – and took their two children and left. In a way he had seen it coming for months and even years, and a month ago he had learned from a good friend, a former officer as well, that his wife was cheating on him with a local power-thirsty career-minded politician for the LDP. 

Two months from retirement, he thought blissfully. That was the only thing good right now, the only thing that made it bearable to get up in the morning and go to work. Had it not been that way… he might as well have been sleeping as much as possible and gotten himself drunk the remaining time. That whore, so inconsiderate, running away all of a sudden, not being fulfilled; her silly and immature ideas about ‘fulfilment’ gave him uncomfortable flashbacks of his first girlfriend back in seventh grade.

His break was over in five minutes. He brought up his wallet and looked at the two-year old photograph of his wife and their two children. Such peaceful days… before he was reassigned to the lazy nightshift. It was impossible to recall why it was, he tried not to think of it; possibly someone of the higher-ups did not like him, indeed it was whispered that it was one of them who was involved with his wife. He put the wallet down.

Sparks from the radio. “Come in Car 17,” the droning voice of the nightly radio-operator proclaimed. For a while he just sipped the coffee and felt its warm rawness fill his mouth, but eventually he got around to answering the radio call. 

“Car 17 here,” he said dryly. He sipped some more coffee whilst he waited for further instructions. He opened the door a bit, realised just how cold it was outside, and shut it again. It was unusually cold for this time of the year, late August and already the nights were closing in on temperatures under 10 degrees Celsius. 

Eventually the response came sparking from the radio. “We’ve had a report about a fire on the mountain,” - Yasuhiro thought of the blast he had heard earlier – “right by the old abandoned shrine near that new waste-of-space golf course.” He knew exactly where that was. 

“I’m on it,” he replied, and started the engine; put the thermos in the back seat and relaxed, reaching his legs for the pedals. 

 

Some ten minutes later he drove up on the small parking lot next to the old abandoned shrine. Parts of it had been demolished, though two old houses next to it were still standing – which is to say they had not been dismantled, but they were on their way to fall apart on their own, colour faded and wood rotting, windows broken by some hoodlums. It was often a frightening place at night; he had been here before in the dark, answering a call about a failed attempt at rape at the scene at least ten years back. It had been misty that night… but this night was near nigh clear, scattered clouds to the east, but otherwise the star strewn skies were visible all around. 

He got out of the car and began making his way up the trail that went up the mountain; it intersected another trail that led down to the golf course just a hundred metres from the old shrine. Just as he passed this intersection – toward the golf course the trail was lit at night – he had begun to sense the smell of fire in the pure night air. He walked another hundred metres where the odour became much clearer and smoke was seen blowing across the trail ahead, a vague misty contour visible amongst the treetops pictured against the spectral stars. Looking into the woods the red and orange tongues licking at the sky were quickly spotted. The fire was not far from the trail at all. While making his way down the small slope from the trail to the woods he brought up his walkie-talkie. The fire services would have to be called to the scene, from the looks of it the fire was out of control. 

Pressing the button and about to start speaking, he slid on a piece of muddy grass, losing control and falling on his bum. “Fuck,” he squealed as he was stopped by a large rock at the bottom of the slope. Those woods sure were perilous, he thought, and turned around, looking for his walkie. But it was nowhere to be seen in the limited and flickering light of the fire. 

He was about to curse again when the movement of some animal in the ground vegetation disturbed the tranquillity of the scene by arousing some birds in a tree just next to him. The area where he had been stopped by the rock was a clearing of some size where grew many big and lush ferns, and amongst those ferns he began to notice a strange motion. Figuring it was just the wind, he turned back to the slope and started trying to make his way up, looking for his damned walkie-talkie. Figures some shit like this would happen so close to retirement, he thought disheartened, feeling the mud gurgling up between his fingers. The slope was too steep and too slippery to move up while standing. 

In the darkness a vague contour of a shiny surface revealed itself. The walkie-talkie. Reaching for this, Yasuhiro Nakasone was accosted half-way by something moving very quickly, with agility unlike anything he had seen before. It was a mere blur; followed by the most excruciating pain he could recall ever feeling, it echoed inside his head, the pulse of vile jungle drums; the fingers! At first his eyes refused to believe what they saw in the inadequate illumination of the stars and the blaze (sausages I eat sausages, sausages and ketchup) but soon he realised just what had happened: the middle and index fingers were missing. Gone. The scream came bubbling up his throat with his heart and the feeling of loss – those poor fingers – but he did not scream. He fell over, slid down the slope again, and vomited up the coffee and bread he had eaten earlier. He thought he could smell sausages burning on a barbeque. 

Just what the hell was happening? Had he set his hand in some sort of strange trap, or was it the attack of some wild animal? And now he was again far from his walkie-talkie, and the fire was raging on. Fire services were needed urgently to control the fire. Bracing himself for the coming pain, taking a deep breath, he began to crawl his way up the slope. The mud stung in his wounds. 

Then, from the ferns behind him rose up a peculiar shrill noise. It was not mechanic, it vibrated with the varied tones of something organic, the utterances of some wild beast; he turned around, but could see nothing. Scared, shocked by what had happened to his fingers, he began to scramble up the slope as fast as possible, on the way looking to grab the walkie. 

He froze up. He had stepped on something, on something sharp, but he did not want to look down on the ground. Something moved in the ferns all around… strange sounds were heard. Squeaks and short and shrill nasal screeches. He stood still. Jurassic Park: was it not there that the dinosaurs could not see things that remained immobile? He wondered, at this moment of great fear and acute danger, what set him thinking of dinosaurs: and had not the piercing pain in his foot suddenly gotten immensely worse, he would have known that it was the murderous determination of the unknown enemy that set him thinking of prehistoric assailants. Something was gnawing at his left foot. 

He looked down. 

He could see it now.

About twice the size of his foot, a strange mammalian-looking creature with what looked like rough fur and narrow slender head was eating away at his foot. He took a jump forward, tripped and rolled down the slope. 

Upon reopening his eyes, Yasuhiro saw the fire reflected in the sharp needle-like teeth protruding from the elongated snout of the critter. Soon his vision went away as the things – for there were many of them – set their teeth in his eyes and prodded them out of the eye sockets like well-cooked eggs. The last thing Yasuhiro Nakasone thought of was that the feeling of the tongue lapping his flesh tickled. Thereafter his mental frame was enveloped in a slowly expanding darkness; the absolute empty amnesia of death.


	4. Chapter 4

“WAKE UP,” NEMA’S mother said and shook him gently. “It’s almost noon.” It was a warm day outside, and the air-conditioning was not on. The temperature in the room was surely above thirty-degrees. Nema was much surprised to learn that he was not sweaty at all. He rose up, dazed from the unsatisfying sleep haunted by weird dreams of space rocks falling in the night. The scorching rays of the sun were pouring in through the windows; Nema sighed and let his eyes investigate the clock on the bedside table: 12:27. 

“You sure slept long,” his mother said and opened the window, letting what felt like even warmer air flow into the room, “did you sleep badly?”  
For a while he just stared at the open window. “I don’t think so,” he eventually replied, “I woke up one or two times; nightmares I think.”  
“Did you hear that strange clattering noise at some point? Me and your dad both woke up at around two hearing this strange sound as of loud fireworks.”

It was not a dream. The rocks had really fallen from the sky. Given the other vivid dreams of the night, it would not have been unlikely that it was another dream. However, this revelation was a positive one – now, he had a goal for the day: he had to go up on the mountain ridge next to that atrocious golf course and look around if he could find the place where it hit the ground. From the looks of it, the object had not been very large – but the sound told that parts of it actually struck ground. He guessed he would find a small area scorched at the site. 

He shook his head. Still felt so tired—stretching his arms into the air, his mother again appeared in the doorway. “Won’t you come down and have some breakfast,” she said, “there’s some bread left from this morning.”

Yawning, he made his way to the bathroom, feeling strangely dizzy. It had happened before that he woke up dizzy, typically after dreams of a very vivid nature or sleeping a bit long. Usually it would abate after eating something. In the bathroom, he took a look at himself in the mirror; the hair all frizzy after sleeping, particularly on the right side which the pillow had been in most contact with. The hair had been dyed an unnatural violet colour, which he liked to maintain ever since he had joined a visual rock band around the time he got out of high school; it was about the length of his face in the front, had three white highlights on the left side, and was typically parted over his right eye; the back was longer and slightly teased. He loved his hair. He was more undecided about his nose, which had by some strange people been described as “European”, though he did not know if this was an insult or a compliment and didn’t fully understand what constituted a “European nose”. 

There was one thing however—a terrible sore spot—and that was the habit of bizarre and random acnes to appear on his nose. He assumed it might have to do with his use of makeup clogging up the pores, but it was odd how it was always on the nose and nowhere else that they appeared. The fact that they were easy to cover up did not really bring much satisfaction; they were still unsightly off-stage, and one mustn’t forget the pain they sometimes caused at the slightest contact with anything. 

 

After using the toilet and brushing his teeth and washing his face off a bit – mostly just to wake himself up – Nema made his way down the stairs to the kitchen, looking for the breakfast his mother had mentioned, feeling the black hole in his stomach once again beginning to demand more matter to gobble up. At the kitchen table his father sat reading the local newspaper; local and local, it was actually a local Tokyo newspaper that exceedingly rarely delved into any news from the rural districts around the metropolitan area, unless it was something really serious, like a spectacular robbery or a violent killing spree, which of course all the national newspapers would gang up on like a large school of starved piranhas on a capybara swimming across the Amazon river. Knowing that the newspaper was finalised at around midnight, it was obviously not going to contain any references to the bolide of last night.

“Did you hear that strange blare last night?” Nema asked his father while he took one of the hardened pieces of bread left on a platter next to the sink. His fathered lowered the newspaper, dissecting (vivisecting) Nema with a disapproving stare – for he was something of a social conservative, a traditionalist, who occasionally would rant on about the feminisation of the Japanese youth (“they sit down when they pee!” he sometimes shouted when he got agitated) and saw the colour of Nema’s hair as symbols of this very degeneration – but finally answered with a single slow nod that looked like a movie scene shot in slow-motion. 

“I saw it…,” Nema began saying, putting a piece of dry bread in his mouth, “it was a meteorite, think it hit ground up the mountain to the west.”  
His father opened his mouth, as though he was about to say something (probably disbelief at what Nema was saying, such was his father, he hadn’t trusted him since he packed up and left for Tokyo a cold winter five years ago), but his mother interrupted them.

“What have I told you about talking with your mouth full of food,” she said. Nema’s father returned to his newspaper. To some extent that was a relief. His father was largely quite the uncomfortable character, though it would be unfair to label him mean-spirited or overall a bad person; he often did simply not know any better. He was a bitter old man, old in the psychological sense, tarnished by years of stress and dull sacrifices as a workaholic, sacrifices he in the end realised were for naught when he was laid off all of a sudden a few years back. After that, he tried to kill himself by throwing himself before a train at the Chichibu station, but had apparently forgot that there were no rapid services passing through, so the train came to a halt and he ended up on the tracks, and was forced to pay 15,000 yen in compensation to the Seibu Railway Company. That certainly did not make him feel any better.

On the other hand, Nema’s mother was almost the complete opposite – though at times this could be just as annoying. She was overly positive and though she looked older than she was (from dealing with his father, internal dialogue imparted) she was a kind and caring mother. 

Finishing up some bread, he had a glass of some sour-tasting juice. 

His father interrupted the silence that had fallen upon the room; “if that thing hit ground,” he said slowly, putting the newspaper down on the table, “then why didn’t we hear some loud explosion or hear the sirens of police cars and fire engines, eh?” 

“It might not have been large enough,” Nema responded, “just a little rock making a soft landing, ending up lodged in a little hole or something, a small earth crater and a little smoke, not necessarily any fire or loud explosion. As for the police cars… if they didn’t see any fire, how could they know for sure where it impacted?”

“You just know everything, don’t you,” his father imparted jeeringly, in response to which Nema just rolled his bright purple eyes in annoyance - the contact lenses gave them a hue similar to his hair -, a defiant display of his displeasure at his father’s ignorance; then again, it was hardly to his father’s knowledge that astronomy was something that interested Nema; absurdly at one time, perfectly sober, his father had confused astronomy with the conniving mumbo-jumbo known as astrology. Nema had been somewhat insulted though not surprised at this ineptitude and told his father that it was an insult to everything holy and unholy to confuse such widely disparate things. The response had been damning: “whatever, it’s all about stars and such shit.” 

Nema went up stairs and put on a new black T-shirt tainted by the hideous logotype of some fiercely popular American band he did not like one bit and a pair of ankle exposing softer pants decorated by yellow flower patterns. Patterns like something a drug-addled hippie would see decorating the ceiling in the most perverse of dreams.

Nema went outside.


	5. Chapter 5

THE SUN, STILL AS MENACING as ever, its beams like the death rays of the Martians in War of the Worlds, was high up in the sky as Nema began his journey down the narrow local streets, meandering as through a maze, the small cottages and houses, the parked bikes and the myriad of electricity wires hung from the wooden street-light poles, here and there a parked car almost blocking the entire way; those old districts often had very narrow and homely lanes. After a short walk, he came up to the wider two-lane highway that passed through from the south towards Chichibu city centre and the railway station; here was the closest bus stop. It was not much to celebrate; a simple sign and a break in the iron railing that followed the road – illustrating the cheapness of the line. The line was not very long, and its main purpose was to provide access to and fro the railway station. There were other bus services in the area as well, but the buses on those routes were very far between. Nema intended to use it to the main sports field, which was located at the foot of the mountain. From this place, he knew from memory, there headed up the mountain a path that was paved all the way to the old monastery. 

The monstrous monastery… Legend said it had been a monastery at one time, hundreds of years back, but that it had been abandoned after certain events. Stories about what exactly those events were varied widely, but the general concept revolved around the monks being led astray by something sinister, coaxed into traffic with beings from the underworld; literally, legend spoke, they were beasts with six legs and a dozen eyes and hairy bulbous backs like giant spiders, each of their heads splitting up and revealing what looked like a human face. Eventually the local peasants learned of this and the monks were captured and drowned in the river. At what date was it that this was supposed to have taken place? It was sometime in the 1200’s, he thought. The monastery stood empty and spooky for unhallowed centuries, seemingly impervious to the ravages of time, for it remained in the same state as the day the peasants broke down the door, dust and spider webs were nowhere to be found. Of course, this was what legend said. Nema didn’t believe it was a reality, it was just superstitious legend created from some sort of actual event. Maybe the monks formed some sort of devious cult and the superstitious people of the time did away with them and… well, hundred years later someone might have added further details to flesh out the reasoning and so created the myth.

Truth was, the monastery had, the only time Nema ever saw it, had its roof caved in and spider webs growing everywhere. No one knew why that was or what had happened, for there were no signs of any trees or large branches from them falling down in some storm, unless someone had moved these. The centuries must have taken their toll on the structure after all, dispelling the nonsensical notion of the immortal building. Nevertheless, that evening when they visited it – he forgot who with – the place had been very frightening. It was something he could not put his finger on. Something vague and mysterious about the place was horrifying, as they opened the door and dared one another to enter room after room, threading across the dusty floor in the light of a weak flashlight low on battery power. Nema had gotten separated from the group and ended up in a small storage room, thinking he was about to return to the main hallway that went through the building. 

One of his then friends had come with the flashlight, and as the illumination swept the floor like a hurricane; and in a flash of light, it was visible, for just one second; the foot prints.

Thinking back as he walked back and forth impatiently waiting for the bus, it was hard to say just what was so horrific about that moment that made him turn around and run out and never come back. He didn’t believe in those ridiculous old myths, he didn’t believe in ghosts or hauntings or anything of the sort; yet there was something about that print in the dust that unsettled him.

It was a bare human foot that had left the print. He did never go back to the old monastery. Two years later, it, along with the quite large and equally abandoned shrine next to it, had been demolished. 

It had seven toes.

Most likely it was just how it seemed; the sight had been very fleeting and his mind had surely conjured up an extra two digits to the foot print. The other kids had run out after him for no particular reason, and they walked away in the night. They asked what Nema had seen, and he replied that it had been a rat. He verily did not like rats, and this they knew. A roaring monster began to make its way towards him, white with blue stripes and flecks; the hideous form of the city bus he was waiting for. 

 

Reclining against the bus seat, at the foot of which lay a tasteless soft-core pornographic magazine partially wrapped in a yellow plastic bag, he once again pondered the events of the night. Making no progress towards sense, however, Nema quickly moved on to other subjects at hand; the fact that pressure was building up in his bladder, and that he was beginning to feel a bit hungry. It would take quite a while to reach his destination, and for this reason he set out to make himself more comfortable. If he was lucky, he would fall asleep. 

Awaiting this moment he amused himself with creating a scenario like the scene of a cheap horror movie; a person would find themselves suddenly waking up from a short nap in the middle of the night on a bus. Outside snow would fall, though it had been summer; and there would be no driver. The bus would move on its own. The main character, a stealthy blur in his fantasy, would head towards where the driver was to sit, but find nothing but an empty chair and an eerily moving wheel. Then the character would peer out, out into the night, and see nothing but blackness except where the headlights and the illumination from within the bus shed rays of yellow warmth onto the unnaturally heavy snow. But wait, there was something else there, out in the darkness, something vague and mysterious, between the snow flakes, like distant asteroids partially illuminated as they appeared from behind the shadow of the moon; big moving objects, seemingly natural. Natural, of course, in the sense of organic; for though rarely seeing much of them, their size and movements where anything but natural and ordinary, their quick reflexes and abrupt shifts from one direction to the other were uncanny and unsettling. 

In the headlights then appeared out of nowhere a deer—

And Nema was kidnapped from his fantasy world of indescribable horrors by the clicking of the ticket machine scanning someone’s bus card, then another, and another, three times did the machine click and at first he didn’t know what about this was so disturbing, till he saw them turning around, the one in the front, a young man wearing a black leather jacket with some ugly punk band’s stylised name written in red blood-like lettering, staring right at him. His hair slick with what appeared to be pork grease, but might as well just have been some kind of hair gel out of production since the 1950’s, eyes dull and empty like those one would see in the eyes of a victim of popular music, and that nose, big, sharp and with a profoundly queerly bugling bridge. He recognised this fellow. 

Taro Hatoyama had been something of an infamous bully of the Chichibudaini Junior High School, according to rumours selecting his victims by some obscure astrological ritual involving birth dates and positions of heavenly bodies on the night sky at the date of their birth and how their positions had since shifted; behind his back everyone laughed, even the teachers, declaring him a crackpot, and even the most open-minded folks with strange beliefs in nonsense such as energy healing referred to him as “rather eccentric”. To his face no one dared tell the truth. Hatoyama was a full 184 cm and had arms bulging with muscles, his chest was a wash board, or so it was much repeated the weeks after he ran naked through the girls’ changing room by the outdoor school swimming pool.

Although Nema tried his best at making himself invisible, his hair being as it was – what some had variously referred to as “extravagant”, “effeminate” and, his favourite for the non sequitur alone, “homosexual” – there was no way Hatoyama could let him slip by. Peeking out the window on the houses, people and trees flashing by as the bus resumed its travels, he could feel a strange sensation chasing away all the warmth of the sunny day and replacing it with wintry cold and emptiness, and he knew this was from the dead gaze of Hatoyama. 

Then the silence was broken by a shrill and indiscreet laughter, which was soon cut off as he began to speak. 

“Look what we got here,” Hatoyama said to his two lackeys, upon which followed a malicious but slightly comical laugh – if only the situation had been comical – and the two henchmen obediently followed suit, echoing their leaders laugh in a way that unintentionally seemed to be a mockery – “a little fairy, why don’t you just put your hair in bunches, too, like a good faggot?” 

Those primitive insults did not much disturb Nema, but the goons which presented them certainly did; and he felt pressed to respond as quickly as possible, dragging out on an answer would only cause them to assume they had made a great impact with their inspired word-smithing skills. What kind of response would he be able to come up with to that, anyway? He looked around, eyes flickering, probing the back of the bus where the door to exit was located. Luckily, he was not too far from it, a mere two rows of torn seats behind him. There was however a problem. The delinquents were blocking the way with their slender muscular bodies, and they were apparently not keen on letting him go. 

“Maybe I will,” Nema finally said; his voice like a squeaky mouse, a futile attempt at a retort that would in perpetuity fuel the insane machinery of the Hatoyama clique, he retrospectively realised. It was a shame he was so shy in pressed situations. 

Hatoyama scoffed. “You’d make a pretty girl.” 

And with that, horror grappled Nema completely. Images flashed by. Violent beating, broken limbs, genital torture, dismemberment, gang-rape in dank long-abandoned crypts; and he began to feel physically sick, a deep revulsion building up from his stomach, a tingling sensation in his head, as though it had been detached and was levitating away into the distance. 

“That’s supposed to mean what…” he whimpered-, unable to say anything more, swallowing abruptly. 

“It’s supposed to mean whatever the fuck you want it to mean. What are you going to do? Scream? There’s no one in the bus right now but us, you and the driver, and that old geezer isn’t going to do anything to stop us. He wouldn’t interrupt us. It’s my father.”

But just as Nema felt his hope die, the bus had begun braking to come to a halt at some stop, and the doors swung open; and at that instance he saw his chance. The three delinquents were forced forward, standing in the middle of the bus as they were, leaving enough space for him to escape. Quick on his legs he moved elegantly past them and darted past the two seats to the exit door; he could behind him hear the curses of Hatoyama shouting at his father for stopping and him ordering his henchmen to take up pursuit. 

Nema jumped out of the bus and onto the sidewalk, and immediately began heading down the street. Some seconds later the two loyal unquestioning soldiers came out of the bus and set off after him, and trailing them followed Hatoyama with his long Ostrich-legs briskly accelerating at a pace Nema would have thought impossible were he not preoccupied with trying to run as fast as he could. Realising that on a straight route he could never get away from the speeding killing machines, he turned off to the left and headed on down a narrow residential street, not far down he again turned off, this time to the right, onto another narrow lane. 

Two narrow street crossings later he turned to the left onto a narrow winding alleyway which he hoped would much assist him in escaping the loathsome cretins on his tail. Electric wiring and occasional clothes lines hung above the narrow path, and after a while he hid behind a soft-drink vending machine, in hopes that if the dreaded delinquents would seek to peer down along the alley, they would see nothing. He remained as motionless as he could for several minutes. 

After five minutes he first dared to breathe a sigh of relief. They had no doubt continued onward. It was likely however, he worried, that they would upon losing visible contact with him begin searching the vicinity systematically, whatever systematically meant to people as mentally disorganised as these – hopefully they would quickly move onto more interesting targets. 

He had been sidetracked on his journey, but it was not all that bad. During the escape he had headed southwest, but this was no trouble. He had intended to continue with the bus along Prefectural Route 208, but from where he was now, the shortest way was to cross the bridge downstream from 208, up to the intersection with Prefectural Route 72. From there, he vividly recalled from his younger years – the terrible curse of nostalgia! – a winding path served as a shortcut across the hill. The hill was rather large, but the trail was not very difficult, zigzagging its way through the steeper parts, which made for an easy and enjoyable walk. Before setting out, Nema bought a carbonated soda from a vending machine outside a small liquor store set into the ground floor of an old derelict house. It was going to be a long day. Soda in hand, he began to walk anew, contemplating the Snowball Earth theory, the idea that the earth some 700 million years ago was completely frozen over in a global ice age, almost completely forgetting the trouble with Hatoyama and his gang of subservient delinquents.


	6. Chapter 6

IT WAS NOT EASY TO CROSS the ridge by bike, but the wide paved pathway’s slopes were less intimidating than the traffic of Route 299, a road that, for some reason, had no sidewalks and was extremely narrow in places. Cycling along it was a nightmare. Yoshiko Kawashima was on her way from a friend’s house back to Chichibu. She had been forced to cycle all the way out to the friend’s house earlier in the morning, for she had forgotten her school bag over there, and she needed it to complete the weekend assignment, which she was sure would take quite some time. It was some difficult nonsense about describing the geological history of the islands for geography classes. She didn’t think it was relevant at all; after all, what did any of that have to do with her? Nothing at all, was obviously the answer. She didn’t need to know why the mountains were there, all she needed to know was that they were, and they were tedious to cross on foot or bike alike. 

Just about to continue this ignorant thought process – if thought it could be considered – she saw to her left trees and undergrowth badly scorched over a fairly large area, here and there from the blackened ground faint white steam-like smoke sailed slowly towards the sky. There had clearly been a fire. That was not all – for a shape was discernible in the leftovers of the inferno; the shape of a man or mannequin. Here and there as though through cracks in the ebony-black hide, red tiger-stripes of blood and flesh were seen, so it could only be a human body. She stopped her bike and got off, throwing her school bag on the ground right by the bike, and walking closer to the edge – the slope down was rather steep and high; at least some three to four metres – and the dead person lay at the bottom. There was something else strange about the body apart from its state, though at first she did not seem to recognise it.

The ribcage was exposed, and the organ cavity seemed to have been emptied, removed – was that an effect of the fire, too? She felt uneasy. No doubt she would have to tell her mother about this when she got home, and she’d have to call the police — there were no markings around here, no police tapes or any evidence of the body being investigated after the fire at all. Maybe they had not seen it? 

Unsettled, she quickly went back to her bike, picked up her backpack and started cycling as fast as she could. A strange sensation in her belly, as though she was about to vomit uncontrollably, became apparent, but by swallowing fervently for a while and trying to focus her eyes on the clouds above she finally managed to master the nausea. Sighing with relief, she sped on down the sloping path, homewards. Tears slowly dripped from her eyes and got smeared over her face by the onrush of air. Was it because of the shock and horror of seeing a dead body brutally eviscerated in a disturbing manner, or was it simply tears of relief, or even simpler, maybe just the current of air blowing in her face. What had happened to that body, she wondered, and thought about what to tell her mother when she got back. 

Those were the confused emotions of shock that went around in her head like clothes in a tumble drier, rattling about back and forth, when something sudden made her eyes contract and her mind focus on a particular sensation. At first, it was not painful at all, like a needle piercing flesh, unpleasant but not altogether painful; thinking this was a bite by some sort of insect, perhaps some form of wasp, she tried to shrug her school backpack to the side. She found it would not really move much at all. 

It was as though it was stuck, glued to her back. And the strange sensation was still present, even growing more pronounced, more painful. Then, the feeling of skin being torn away, something like searing, burning, a uncanny warmth and the sense of something moving across her back, something animate. The change came suddenly, like a hard punch right in the back, she could feel something crack (was it the spine?), she could feel it tingle and crack all the way up into her neck and the back of her head; and then, the pain, horrible indescribable pain, unlike anything she had ever felt before; but soon that pain gave way to numbness and she realised her muscles had gone lazy. Part of her body had been paralysed, and from her bike now out of control she soon fell – it was doing pretty good speed – and she scraped her face against the asphalt, leaving a trail of blood. The taste of iron in her mouth, and the numbness spreading; what was happening, why was it happening, and again confused thoughts, questions, started bubbling in her head until the last light was turned off in the City of Consciousness and a peaceful stillness made itself known throughout her body. 

 

Despite the fact that the muscles were no longer working – the flame of life had minutes ago sputtered a final time and then gone dark – there were movements; strange twitches, and a ghastly wet and slimy slobbering. The movements were spasmodic, at times the scene went silent and still, but soon again the slobbering, the movements, twitches and uncanny snivelling resumed. 

Blood began to seep out of her navel, exposed as it had been by the fall – it had shredded part of her shirt – and soon formed a bulge, a bulge that began to grow with what looked like animate prodding from inside. 

Silence and stillness; the prodding resumed with greater fervour; and out it came, red with blood and torn fragments of flesh and viscera hanging from its pointy black spines; moving with the curiosity of a rabbit or any terrestrial rodent, it quickly scurried towards the undergrowth to the side of the paved path, leaving behind an uneven trace of slowly browning redness.


	7. Chapter 7

THE TRAIL UP THE MOUNTAIN – the short cut which Nema had decided to take – was a sordid story; narrow and winding sharply in places, past steep cliff sides featuring dark shadowed caves chiselled out by streams of water during thousands and thousands of years. He had not been at this place for a long time; long forgotten memories announced their return – indeed, one day a very long time ago, during one of his first three years in school he was sure, he had tripped over some root after school, and from his school bag a book from the library had been lost. There had been a fine of 2000 yen and it was one of the few times he could recall his father cursing at him in anger – though Nema now knew that was more to do with the fact that he had been fired from his job that very day. 

The impact site could not be far off; judging by the view from his window, the place where the trail he was now on met the paved path up the mountain along the gentler slope from the west must be within a few hundred meters. There would, he recalled, be another trail crossing the one he was on, with which he could start heading eastward some distance before the pathway. Having mapped this out in his head, thoughts returned of rocks flying through space and the peril that this contained; not only rocks but rocks dotted in ice – or as one astronomer had referred to them, snowy dirtballs – comets. When Nema was but 11 years old he had seen Comet Hale-Bopp and found himself frightened by its silent majesty, and he had a vague memory of seeing a second comet not too long before or after that- mayhap it was Comet Hyakutake. In the region around Earth there was said to be around 500-1,000 objects with a diameter larger than 1 kilometre; large enough to cause catastrophic damage to a considerable area. Of course, Nema knew, that damage would depend on not only the speed of the object but also of its composition, and thus were was a wide spectrum of potential events, but even at the best, an impact by such a large rock would cause considerable destruction; for was not the object that exploded some 10 kilometre above Siberia in 1908, flattening woods over an area of 2,150 square kilometres, estimated to have been but 20-90 meters in size? Above a major population centre even such a small meteor or comet fragment exploding would have the result of a nuclear bomb of some 5-10 megaton. 

He recalled too, another story, of how on August 13, 1930 the sky over a region of the Amazon jungle in Brazil was affected by peculiar atmospheric disturbances; the sunlight turned blood-red and the sun’s rays appeared to be blocked out by something casting a dark shadow over the area; and hissing sounds were heard coming from the sky, increasing gradually in volume as though they were coming closer to the earth. Fishermen in the area reported seeing large balls of fire falling from the sky “like thunderbolts”, and landing in the forest with the rumbling of thunder. Three distinct explosions were heard echoing over the forest where they hit, for hundreds of kilometres away; each affecting the earth with a trembling as of an earthquake; and soon upon this followed the fall of a fine white ash from the sky, covering trees and buildings and even the river itself. 

There was some dispute about the actual details of course – Nema had read this report in some science journal some time ago – as it had been such a long time, and the newspaper reports had not been jotted down by people knowledgeable in the violation of earth by extraterrestrial bodies. In conjunction with this very same event, he recalled some documentary he had happened to catch on Television when he was young, claiming to have found the very impact crater from this event, which had included an interview with some aged eyewitness. 

Entertained by those thoughts on the insignificance of mankind on the planet earth, Nema encountered the crossing trail he had been looking for and soon made his way towards the suspected site of the fireball’s impact. 

 

Still some distance away, he began to see ahead what appeared to be a clearing; it was odd, he thought, for he had no memory of a clearing ever being around here. Hurrying along the trail that swerved betwixt the younger and smaller trees in this area of the woods, he soon noticed what was awry ahead; it appeared that, over a considerable area on the slope, the trees had lost most of their smaller branches, leaves and needles; and the undergrowth was nothing but a scorched black wasteland; the thick trunks of the larger trees had seen their bark turned brittle and charcoal-black. There was little doubt now; this had been the scene of an arrival from beyond the spheres. 

Excited by this confirmation of his dreamy expectations he increased his speed somewhat and sought to determine the area in which the fire damage was worst, hoping this would guide him towards the hypocentre. 

Before long he came about an area where the burned tree-trunks stripped of their every branch and leaf and needle had fallen or stood leaning at perilous angles; and in the midst of this, from which all the leaning trees were facing away, there was a small mound. Walking closer to this it became obvious that mound was nothing other than a crater wall, and as he peered over the rim a landscape of crushed bushes half-buried in dirt and cracked fragments of rocks revealed itself. Heart racing at this marvellous discovery, he tried to take in the vistas now exposed: the formation was perhaps five meters across, and almost perfectly circular. The wall was just above a meter high, sloping more steeply on the inside down to an area that was almost flat apart from yet another small depression in the very centre, where small grey pebbles had been revealed by the tremendous upheaval. From this depression rose a faint trail of white-blue smoke marching off into the sky. Fixing his eyes on the source of the smoke, he found it to be a peculiar red rock with a brick-like quality. When the sun now and then peered out from behind the scattered clouds drifting slowly from the east Nema could see that the object contained some substance with reflective properties, glass perhaps; and that it was riddled with strange holes and had rugged edges and peculiar sharp-looking protrusions, possibly resulting from the entry into the earths atmosphere, where some sensitive material had evaporated. He did not find this appearance to his liking. It made him think of corals, and he had always been afraid of corals; the potential for small insidious creatures with horrifying appearances to hide in corals was far too great. 

This was the rock from space. Its dimensions were not very great; perhaps it was fifty centimetres across, though more could possibly be hidden underground. It seemed to have burrowed in pretty well. He thought about examining it closer, but the dark holes were too much for him to dare get any closer; not to mention that it was still smoking, meaning it was hot and not kind enough to allow any touch. 

Turning away from the rock he heard – or rather, thought he heard – a strange noise, a shrill sneezing or squeak bubbling up through the tiny sinus-passages of some small rodent, like a classmate’s pet rat during second year of school’s show and tell period. Associating this with the space-travelling rocks, he peered back over the rim he had just left behind him. As expected, he could see nothing.   
Must be the nerves, he thought, and walked on.


	8. Chapter 8

AFTER DEPARTING THE AREA left barren by the fire, he saw through the trees and undergrowth the colourful red and yellow outline of a police tape surrounding some distant portion of the woods, in the direction of a nearby road. Although he noted this, he did not pay particular attention to it, for in his mind it could be nothing but some restricted area surrounding a car accident. Perhaps a car had driven off the roadway and into a tree, as a result, it could be guessed, of the fire, which must have captured the driver’s attention. From those musings Nema was soon brought back into reality, for he saw before him the corpse of some animal quite unlike anything he had ever seen before. 

Possessing the general body plan of a corpulent rodent, not entirely unlike that of a rat, the creature had several notable features that quickly caught his attention, the most stunning of which was its glistening grin, where from swollen red gums protruded narrow needle-like teeth about half as long as the creatures entire face. The teeth were so long that in order to avoid them causing harm to the jaws of the creature itself, they had evolved pointing slightly outwards. Teeth from the upper and lower jaw nearly intersected, for the jaw was very dense in denture indeed. Around the mouth, perhaps as an additional defence against the sharp teeth, ran the animals lips, which appeared to be hard and rubbery from the looks of things. The second most striking thing was that its belly was open down the middle as it lay on the side, revealing what appeared to be a mass of flesh-like tissue along with strange dark-green tubular forms, which Nema assumed were the intestines. 

The animal had fur, or what looked like fur, but it took the form of rigid spikes with sharp edges of considerable length, much longer than those of any hedgehog species Nema had ever read about. And even so, he was sure no hedgehog had teeth like this creature, and even if they did, it was sure an odd find, seeing as no species was native to Japan. He reached down into his tattered black jeans pockets, looking for some plastic bag from a convenience store to use to transport this animal, certain that it would be worthy of further study. Before going to the bus he had taken to reach Chichibu, he had visited a convenience store to buy two drinks and a bag of chips, and this had given him a bag. He was sure he had put it somewhere on him, for he liked not to throw them away and often stuffed them into his pockets. In his trousers left pockets he found nothing but keys to his flat on the outskirts of Koto-ward, Tokyo, and a few old receipts. One of them was more than two years old and he was struck by an awesomely disturbing nostalgia as he read the dating on it. Moving on from his trouser pockets he investigated the other pocket he found what he was looking for, a white plastic bag with the familiar blue and white logotype of Emily Mart. It was sometimes a good thing to be a collector, as his mother liked to call it; someone with a peculiar innate aversion to throwing things away. He took this plastic bag and carefully held it open and brought it close to the vicious maw of the unsightly rat-head, spouting in places the fur was thin a black leathery hide upon which the playful rays of the summer sun resulted in a kaleidoscopic dance of rainbow colours in an almost hypnotising fashion he was much keen to hide away; the bag open, the pulled it down over the creature’s head and soon the body was enveloped. A sigh of relief spontaneously sprung forth, for he was much pleased to no longer have to stare upon that disgusting thing. It was safe inside the bag. Nema was happy that it was not a heavy thing. He guessed it might have weighed a mere 3-5 kilograms, but then again, some of its entrails were left in a pile of flesh that he did not succeed in getting into the bag. There was a peculiar lack of blood in the animal, he noticed as he examined the bag from below. Even on the ground was hardly a stain. What little was in the dry grass might have come from the meat it appeared to have eaten, rather than the animal itself. Did the creature have no blood of its own? 

Resolving not to contemplate but to seek outside expertise, Nema looked at his mobile phone to see the time: 14:59. He had been out for quite a long time. He also noticed he had two missed calls from his good friend and room-mate in-town, Junna. For now, he ignored those, and with the Emily Mart bag in hand he begun the arduous march home. From the path down the slopes of the hills the view over Chichibu city was a marvel to behold, and beyond the irritating sounds of vile grasshoppers in the bushes all around was the churning noises of human activity; cars, the clattering of wood against wood in some distant construction yard, and the shouts of children at a school, and the rhythm of the waters down the river, the ringing of the warning at a closing gate at some railway crossing somewhere, it all forming a maelstrom of acoustic impressions which in his head formed a sardonic death-march, the soundtrack of a doomed civilisation’s final breaths. Nema was not sure what was so frightening about it, but was near panic; was it the monstrous creature he had just picked up which darkened the perceptions so? Focusing instead on the always annoying grasshoppers was no rescue, for in his mind their repetitive noises took the shape of mocking laughter and formed pictures in his head of a dark rainy day where he sat in a puddle on a street surrounded by people without faces pointing their skeletal fingers, laughing, shouting obscenities, at him. The ground under his feet appeared to be turning into mud and a tingling sensation shot out from his feet and marched up via his legs towards his hands, towards his head, and he felt as though he was about to fall down, faint, so he dropped the bag carelessly and put his hands to the sides of his head, upon which the expanding darkness began to retreat, the figures began to walk away into the rainy haze of a half-remembered school day a million years ago. The ground soon solidified.

What was that all about, he wondered, standing with his face in his palms. He did not want to think. He had to focus on something else. Looking at the trees around him, he tried to think of the trees, how majestic and eternal they were when compared to the fleeting existence of a human being, living for many hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years, strong and rigid and not at all like humans. People were like small bugs scuttering across their trunks. Onto the trunk of a nearby pine, someone had carved a heart, like young naïve lovers do in the romance flicks; but here were no names. Contemplating that mayhap it had been drawn by a hippie with a passion or sexual love for trees he felt some stability return to his chaotic mind. He picked up the bag.


	9. Chapter 9

IN HIS PARENTS’ HOUSE were many memories. In the living room he once slipped on a carpet and hit his head on the table. There was blood. In the kitchen he once could not control his urge to touch the warm stove hotplates. The narrow hall to which the front door opened up, that was where one of his long lost childhood friends once vomited just as they got in. Nema remembered that he too soon thereafter fell ill with a dreadful gastrointestinal infection. So many memories, he thought; so many memories and most of them bad. There had to be many memories of cheerful childish innocence, from the time before the strangling arms of reality had set their hands around his throat, but it was hard to remember, at least with any clarity. Vague momentary recollections he managed to dig up from underneath the black tarpaulin of maturity and adulthood: attempting to build a dam in a sandbox, the red-yellow and blue swing-set near his kindergarten from which a jumping competition was held – but most of his memories seemed to be disconnected clips from children’s television programming. 

The house was devoid of the sounds of life, and despite the air-conditioning unit fixed by a living room window desperately churning out cold air, it was as warm as the dank magma-heated corridors and tunnels of inner earth, where with primal urge flowed forth the white-hot semen of Gaia.   
Nema was pleased his parents were not home, for the bag he was carrying looked quite suspicious, and was sure to attract unwanted attention. From some distance it appeared he was carrying around a plastic bag containing a dead fish or something like that, and a strange substance had begun to leak from the creature: a half-transparent yellowish mucus of some kind. He took it up to his room.

 

Leaving the cadaver inside the plastic bag on a chair in his room, he went downstairs again and looked through some old chests and boxes, and eventually found what he was looking for; His mother’s digital camera, which she often used to take pictures of her flower plantation on the small backyard in the spring, participating in some silly competitions. He took this to his room and tried his best to photograph the creature without taking it out of the bag, for Nema was sure not keen on touching that slime or the creature itself. It had begun to give off a faint but unpleasant smell.   
Upon taking five pictures of the creature he proceeded to load them into his computer via the USB cable that had come with the camera. These he attached to an email without any text to his good friend Junna, who was staying at Nema’s flat in Tokyo since he got evicted from his own flat due to it being rented-out illegally second-hand without valid contract. And Nema appreciated the company.

 

After dispatching the email he brought up his mobile phone and looked over the received calls he had failed to notice earlier, and finally called Junna’s number. Four signals passed before he replied. 

“Hello?” Junna said, breathing out heavily as though he had been exercising. Junna never exercised, Nema knew. He was incapable of engaging in such a dull activity. It was just not his thing.

“It’s Nema,” he gently said.

“Oh. Why did you not answer when I called earlier? What were you doing?”

“I didn’t notice the calls.”

“Maybe you should change the ring-tone then.” 

Junna was noticeably irritated.

“I’m sorry; it was not intentional, please? I called you now, didn’t I?”

Junna sighed. “Fine. How is it going over there? Your parents giving you trouble?”

“Not really. Last night I saw something in the sky-“

“Not this again, Nema. Last time it was just Venus and you said it was an alien craft of some kind on reconnaissance mission to earth.”

“Not like that!” Nema was not happy to have such past things brought back up. It had been a night almost ten years ago and a bright light had been visible in the winter night sky. The moon had been nigh-on full and Nema and Junna had been walking around looking to find old discarded fireworks from the recent New Years celebrations, though he could not recall why they had cared about those. He thought it had been mentioned by some other kids they had met that if you collected the old fireworks and lit them on fire they would explode. At any rate, as their exhalations made traces of vapour underneath the moon, slightly orange-red as a result of some air pollution drifting by, a bright object, brighter than any other beside the moon, was visible. Nema thought that it would have been pretty exciting if maybe it was an extraterrestrial vessel on a mission to earth, to investigate and survey humanity and all its wickedness. He had told this story to Junna, of how it was a big ship from which smaller ones were dispatched, smaller ones that travelled to earth and scanned the lands with incomprehensible and utterly alien equipment. Somehow it became more convincing to himself if it was told to someone else… his best friend… though he still knew full well himself he was making it up, for a few seconds it was as though he was part to important knowledge no one else had, something that was exciting, something to which both he and Junna were tied, something they shared. He normally did not feel this connection when it involved himself; why this was he had often contemplated, but could not bring up any satisfying answers. But when he and Junna were connected by that cosmic link in a chain of knowledge, it felt great, empowering.

“Like what then?” Junna interrupted his train of thoughts that was about to come to a halt at some station. 

“Like a meteorite, a falling star, whatever you want. I think, maybe it hit ground somewhere near here. This is only back story anyway. I set out to go look for any crash site or what-have-you, and I found this queer animal body in the woods. I attached some pictures in an email to you. I brought it with me in a bag. I think we should maybe bring it over to your uncle at Tsukuba. I have never read about anything like it. It’s like a hedgehog, basically, but they don’t occur around here.”

“Except when they are blue,” Junna dryly imparted, giggling as though he was not taking Nema seriously.

“Very funny. Look at the pictures, it’s… bizarre and monstrous.”

“Okay, I will”, Junna spoke, and a short silence was followed by the tapping of keys and more silence and finally some unclear utterance of revulsion. 

“It sure looks disgusting,” Junna continued, “are you sure you are not kidding with me? Tatsuro would be angry if we’d bring him some plastic model…”

“Does it look like a plastic model to you?” Nema was a bit annoyed at Junna’s reluctance to believe him. Then again, the creature was an odd thing indeed, as such, perhaps it was no wonder he was having trouble believing his eyes. It would be better if he saw it with his own eyes. Hopefully.

“No, but… it’s so strange. All right, we’ll go see Tatsuro about that creature. I guess it can’t harm. Let’s meet up at Shinakitsu railway station. Tomorrow, around noon?”

“Sure,” Nema said. It was too late to make the journey right now. They’d end up stranded in Tsukuba Science City, which was a planned city, built from the 1970’s onwards, which housed many scientific faculties and specialised educational institutions. Junna’s uncle, Tatsuro Ikeno, worked at the University of Tsukuba’s Biology Department. Nema had met him a couple of years ago during Junna’s birthday party, where he had swung by carrying one of those small portable freeze boxes stuffed with fish. Said they were to be tested for environmental toxins as a part of a project to investigate the health of the fish stock in the Seto Inland Sea. Tatsuro was in his mid-thirties and sported a menacing crew-cut and sleazy looking black goatee. His voice was raspy and Nema seemed to remember that during his short visit to the birthday party, he had gone out on the balcony to smoke five times. He did not seem to be a very helpful fellow, for as Junna told, he was rude and egocentric, but in this case, there was a clear need for his expertise. 

Junna uttered some farewell phrases and hung up. Nema took the plastic bag and went downstairs again, and put the carcass into the freezer. The trip to Tsukuba took a little over than three hours. He hoped that the body thawing during this time would not cause any serious impediment to Junna’s uncles’ ability to tell of its nature, or for that matter that it would result in any embarrassing altercations with others were there to leak some horrendous odour from the bag. After putting the body in the freezer, he went back up to his room and laid down lazily upon his bed, dreaming of the morrow. Discoveries to be made…


	10. Chapter 10

THE WALK WAS LONG from the railway station to the university proper, passing on blue-painted steel bridges across wide nigh-empty streets and along winding paths through well-landscaped parklands in the shadow of blooming Weeping Willows, amidst the buzz of miniscule insect-life, past the orange and red carps of some ornamental pond; and at intervals along the way, Nema, finding himself terribly distracted by Junna’s fine, reddish hair which was tied up in two cute bunches, would almost bump into a street lamp or some other fixture; but eventually, they reached the wide glass doors to the Biology Department, located next to a blue high-rise block housing some student dormitories. The walk had taken more than half an hour; and about half-way through the journey, Nema had handed the heavy portable freezer to Junna, complaining wildly of the terrible chore of carrying the frozen specimen, using the fact that he was carrying his old weathered rucksack upon his back – though it contained nothing notably heavy – as an excuse; he was already carrying his fair share. Upon taking over the carrying, Junna had uttered a few sighs of displeasure, but found himself unable to protest further; and like a loyal servant he – with a dignified smile across his face – carried the burden. Nema had never told him this, but he liked when he smiled; it was somewhat of a rare treat to see Junna’s enormous teeth, which were a natural wonder, crooked in just the right ways.

Stepping through the doors into the biology department building - a three-story affair with light-brown and milk-white tiles in random patterns covering the façade – they were greeted well by cold gusts from the air-conditioning, a welcome respite from the dreadful late summer heat wave – Nema recalled the temperature had read °31 Celsius on one of the digital signs displaying assorted curiosa as he met Junna and changed trains at Akitsu station – and immediately inside there was a small reception, where no one was present at the moment, a brown coach and straight ahead a wide corridor. The floors were well-polished to the point where they could be used as a mirror were one so inclined, and beside each of the long corridor’s many doors – most on the right side – were to be found plastic palm trees roughly a meter and a half high. 

“Have you been here before?” asked Nema curiously, for though Junna had walked with some determination to this location from the station half-way across Tsukuba, it was rather well-signed, so it could just have been a stroke of luck for all he knew. Junna, in response, lifted the portable freezer he was still carrying higher, gesturing that he thought it time for Nema to take over the tedious transportation. The freezer itself was not very heavy – it was thick white plastic on the outside and had a blue handle bar and a turquoise lid – but with the weight of the specimen inside, and in particular, the many freezer packs necessary to keep the cold in the tormenting warmth, it was undeniably fairly unpleasant a thing to lug around. 

Since they were at roads’ end, Nema did not in the least object to Junna’s reasonable proposal, and he took over the portable freezer; and as he did, Junna breathed out as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders, or rather, his arms; and upon conclusion of this fragrant display of new-won liberties, he replied to Nema’s question: 

“Once, though it was a good two years ago now, but I remember the way to where we will find him.”

“And that is where?” 

“The cafeteria.”

 

In the cafeteria sat half a dozen or so men in white lab-coats sipping coffee and snacking on mixed bakery products with not a worry in the world. In the middle of a loud discussion was, at the centre of attention at this very moment, Tatsuro Ikeno, still with the menacing goatee and the crew-cut and the contours of his muscular chest visible through that thin white coat, an appearance that made him look comical, as though he was an actor in a cheap pornographic flick; and Nema’s warped imagination derailed at once: clearly he could picture it, a doctor-patient kind of scenario being played out, Tatsuro was the doctor, entering the room while reading the test result silently to himself, and then in melodramatic fashion telling that poor patient that the only cure for his terrible ailment was an extraction of semen—

Nema was brought back to reality from this quite queer a train of thought by loud laughter from all present men; all men, mostly young-looking wannabe-professors working on getting there by kissing arse and licking in strange dark hairy places best not observed by daylight, kicking at the same time in the general direction of any competition; yet now, here in the coffee lounge, the atmosphere was relaxed, and after the salvo of laughter had ended like the ebb after the flow, Tatsuro saw them where they stood and immediately recognised Junna.

“Why Junna!” he shouted, “It sure as hell wasn’t yesterday! How’s your mother doing with that gambling problem?”—and as Junna was about to say something, he was immediately interrupted, rather rudely, as Tatsuro continued his excited speaking; “and your little friend here must be Nema, the one I’ve heard so much about—“ and as he heard those words, Nema’s ears attained a redness only before seen in apples and strawberries. Tatsuro walked up to them and took from Nema the portable freeze box. 

“Is this the specimen you called about yesterday?” Tatsuro asked, weighing it casually. “Didn’t you say it was small? This is quite the heavy thing we got here.”

“It’s just the weight of those freezer packs”, Junna replied.

Tatsuro nodded. “Well then, come on boys, let’s check this shit out.”


	11. Chapter 11

THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIALS WERE HERE. That was what the phone-call from the “Unidentified Flying Object Investigative Society” said on Yuze Kubota’s answering machine on the morning of the twenty-first, a Sunday, and it just so happened that at the very same time that Nema and Junna greeted each other at Akitsu railway station, Yuze played that message. He played it once, twice, and after three times he was still not certain he was hearing things correctly. He regretted the day he had joined that damned organisation and its unceasing banal dedication to the arrival of extra-terrestrials to earth, the leadership seemed more and more to become a demented cult. But he had signed up, more out of curiosity for the psychology involved in the sightings of unidentified flying objects and related phenomena, and by some sequence of events he could not entirely remember, he had become a regional investigator. Every now and then he received calls telling him of reports he was encouraged to investigate – he was the representative for the north-western Kanto-region and surroundings – and that he had to file reports on. These days, when many other things were not going so well in his life, it was not really much of a problem, and besides, writing up those reports was generally a nice time off from his own situation, and it brought in some meagre amounts of money. 

The leaders of the organisation were seldom pleased with his conclusions, and there had been attempts to replace him with a more zealous believer; alas, his reports were detailed and executed with skill and style, and they had been unable to find any lunatic able to compete. 

Today’s call was interesting, to say the least. For although reported by a person he could think of only as raving mad, there was a certain consistency to the story. As told by the answering machine, a glowing object had become visible in the sky at 02:17 on August 20, around the location of the constellation of Cygnus. The object was observed with binoculars at first, but brightened rapidly and became larger. At 02:20, the object was clearly visible in the sky by naked eye, and its movements became clearer and more rapid, the observer went on; at 02:21, the object was approaching the zenith and suddenly “divided itself” into “several vessels” which, accompanied by faint sounds likened to “a neighbour popping pop-corns” (Yuze reflected that the poor fellow must have some thin walls), after which they quickly vanished from view behind a mountain. The observation took place from the balcony of a small house on the outskirts of Kawagoe, north north-west of Tokyo, on the outskirts of the urban area; probably vanishing in the vicinity of Mount Dodaira, Izugatake or Bukou. 

Yuze immediately disregarded the breaking up “into several vessels” as nonsensical speculation, but thought that the observation was definitely of something genuine. Something had entered the atmosphere. The event had to have been observed by others, and a sure card was that any astronomer at a nearby observatory had to have seen it: at that thought, he resolved to pay a visit to an old friend to investigate further this apparent violation of the terrestrial sanctity. But first, he really had to use the bathroom, get dressed and eat something. He was starving. 

 

Hunger. Always this damnable hunger, a blasphemous urge to eat. For Yuze, eating had no hints of pleasure. It was a tedious chore, like washing the dishes or emptying the bowels. Taking out the rubbish. Putting the rubbish in. Cooking on the stove was ramen, two threads hanging outside getting burned on the hotplate, shrivelling and turning black like a corpse rotting in the summer sun; towards the ventilation vent rose slender veils of alternating grey and white fumes, whirling hypnotically. Yuze could only watch the events unfold when he peeked in the direction of the stove, for he was transfixed, focused on an article in the local newspaper, a dreadful thing chock-full of reactionary right-wing nonsense and propaganda most of the time, but this time there was something for his eyes to do more than just gaze over in disgust. The eccentric caption to the article read, in large fonts and with a black and white out-of-focus photograph of three white specks connected by what looked like a fine thread right by it: SPACE ROCK HARASSES LOCAL FARMER, and a sub-title reading, with excessive exclamation points added liberally to the end: KILLS CATTLE WITH NOXIOUS WHITE FUMES AND BEASTLY MUTILATIONS, DAMAGES GARAGE ON PREMISES. The article itself was not much more clear on the details, but what could be deciphered was that a fragment of the meteorite had struck the farm at sometime past two in the morning and killed two milk-cows and destroyed a garage, which was under construction but nearing completion. There had been no investigation into the deaths of the cows, but they had been inside a building whose roof had been torn by a very small fragment, and Yuze thought it was very possibly they had simply been shocked to death. Except for one thing that made him wonder: it was said that the cows had been disembowelled, found as mere heaps of skeleton and skin. But this was a sensationalist rag, a newspaper well-known for its lunacy stances and susceptibility to exaggerations in the name of the Holy Circulation. It was not impossible that they had simply fabricated those strange details. It would not be the first time a newspaper lied to bolster the circulation; it was, after all, a common practice in the industry. 

But there was a smaller picture, purportedly showing one of the cows, and in that picture it was clear that something very vicious had been done unto the cows. The appearance of the picture was making him feel a bit frightened. He did not remember the last time anything had done that. There was some nameless evil clamouring to the tiny dots making up the picture, some unholy abomination hidden in the flaps of skin resting upon those bones, bones that the article insisted were covered in “gnaw marks”. The “white fumes” of the title came from the farmer claiming he had seen a “cloud of white fumes”, move across the yard as he first peeked out the window to see what had happened. He was unable to see anything out of the ordinary except for this at the moment. 

Something started to smell funny. 

The ramen was overcooked and the water was critically low. Yuze cursed and put the skillet in the sink, and brought out a new one and started anew. And in his mind a disturbing train of thought just departed the station platforms, a train that was nothing but aluminium stretchers covered with stacks of flesh and bone, skeletal fragments jutting out at all sides: cattle mutilations.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alien autopsy.

“This is something very much fun,” said Tatsuro, “this is a scalpel. And this is my favourite thing of all, a speculum.” He laughed and put it down next to the other tools on a small grey metallic tray. “We’re not going to need it, I don’t think, but I like having it around.” Again, in Nema’s mind he could see him doing naughty things to young boys and girls alike, with his enormous arsenal of medical tools at his disposal. Nema found himself being aroused in the most disturbing way. 

“So, shall we get the party started or is there something else you’d like to tell me before we start? This isn’t some prank, I hope not, like that last time when your mother, Junna, sent you over here with that raccoon and said it was some goatsucker after she watched some nonsensical documentary, more like a mocumentary—”

“No, it’s some animal Nema here found up in some woods near where his parents live,” said Nema.

Nema nodded and continued: “I think it’s like a hedgehog or something, sure looks like one. In some ways at least...”

“Hedgehog?” shrugged Tatsuro. “They’ve been extinct here for since the time of the beginning of the last great ice-age, about two and a half million years ago.”

“Just look at it,” Nema said and engaged in a nervous staring contest with the reflective floor. 

Tatsuro put on a pair of green gloves and carefully opened the portable freezer. From their vantage point next to the wooden table over which was draped a white plastic sheet they could not see well into the freezer, but the aspect of his face became at once haunted, pale and slightly haggard, as though he had suddenly aged and become much tired. With slow movements he grabbed the thing out of the Emily Mart shopping bag in which it was enclosed, and brought it over to the table. The dissecting table. 

 

With a tape measure the thing’s dimensions were specified. Its length was 52 centimetres from snout to rear, and the circumference was 31 centimetres. Accounting for tissue loss due to the wound in the belly and what appeared to be the lack of large amounts of tissue from the region, Tatsuro estimated it had been around 45 centimetres in circumference in life. Its weight in death was 3.7 kilograms. 

Nema and Junna looked curiously on as Tatsuro began going over the body’s salient features. 

“We have two large eyes of peculiar physiology,” he said, poking carefully with a narrow needle-like object, “the structure of the lens is advanced, but I have never seen anything quite like it. The ocular cavities are very shallow, and from a position slightly behind the eyes there is a longitudal ridge of bone or hardened cartilage or similar, which meet at the nose, where there is a singular nostril.” 

“Then there are the teeth,” he said and smiled vividly, “this bugger has some ferocious chompers, why, I think they just might be comparable to yours, Junna.” 

Junna rolled his eyes and said nothing. He knew well that it was pointless to try any counter-attacks against a ruthless egotist with a golden tongue like Tatsuro. 

“Large numbers of teeth,” Tatsuro continued and with the scalpel he cut a bit of flesh from the lip – if indeed that word was appropriate – and revealed what appeared to be small sacks, “strange sacks in large numbers along each cranial labium,” and they appeared to be quite resilient, for they were not possible to damage with the scalpel’s sharp edge. “Very tough material, can’t say I’ve ever encountered something like this before.”

Tatsuro seemed to be concentrating heavily as he poked on the body in various places with sharp and blunt tools alike; “the jaws appear very muscular, as do the legs, suggesting, together with the teeth and what would appear to be part of the stomach contents leaking out from it, that it is predatory and ferociously so. The hardened ridges on the cranium might be related to inter-species fighting, possibly suggesting considerably aggressive nature in species.” The scalpel danced across the insides, the ones that remained, probing and poking and slicing. “This is unlike anything I’ve ever seen; the stomach is enormous and extremely flexible, and this dark-green substance which is slowly melting from being frozen appears to be the stomach acids, can you feel that strong odour, like that of a vile dog’s breath?”

They certainly could. It was filling the room. The horrible rancid olfactory sensation, like staring down the maw of a celebrity mutt of short stature, always barking and barking to make itself heard like the most desperate and insidious reality-show participant, both of them could well imagine the horrible sensation of slobbering tongues dribbling vile saliva in copious amounts in their faces. Both had a strong dislike for dogs. Eventually Junna coughed with revulsion from the smell. 

“In the stomach,” Tatsuro resumed indifferently, “there are remains of the last supper, last thing eaten before the creature died, and as you can see here it’s well-coloured red meat, from the texture and consistency,” he paused; and soon the scalpel was at it again, cutting and prodding its way through this piece of meat that looked a bit like raw steak, “I’d say, probably mammalian.”

“Here, we also have what appear to be digestive organs, perhaps the bowels or what would be the equal thereof; they have the appearance of chlorophyll-green tubular strings of varying width,” and as he pulled on one of them with the scalpel, it showed great flexibility. “Marvellously flexible tissue, must allow passage of prey considerably larger than its head.” Upon completing this observation, the poking stick and scalpel returned to the head, where they laid down a few incisions revealing the muscular and skeletal structure of the jaws. Tatsuro was much amazed by the creature and its peculiar composition. His latest incisions revealed that the creature’s upper and lower jaw segments were not directly connected but with flexible and uncannily strong muscular fittings.

“So,” said Nema at last, “what exactly is this thing?”

Tatsuro sighed. Resignation was the general order of expression on his face. “I don’t know,” he said wryly, “for what I can tell you boys is that this is no animal I have ever seen before. I doubt anyone has. I have never read about anything like this. This creature’s anatomy is utterly alien to me, and though it displays certain similarities to the established forms of life on this planet in some aspects, it seems to have a different life cycle. Notice the lack of reproductive organs. Its belly is completely devoid of any common mammalian indicators: no mammary glands; in fact, there appears to be nothing even remotely similar in this creature.”

“Lack of reproductive organs?” Junna imparted. “Is this the moment in a Hollywood movie where some character or other says that it must lead a boring life?”

Nema smiled, but Tatsuro did not seem to pay the slightest attention, instead he brought out with his glove-covered hands some thing from the inside of the creature that had the shape and texture of a chilli pepper; a red crumpled thing about the length of his index finger. 

Tatsuro held it up. “This must be, judging from the connection to blood vessels and what-have-you, the animal’s heart,” he said, “and as you can see, it has quite the strange shape.”

 

Nema and Junna sat waiting in one of the offices. It was a drab place, white walls, a ceiling of white covered with black spots, big bright white lamps and tables of teak and a chair behind a desk of black leather, and the sofa upon which they sat, which was a sordid cheap affair covered here and there in peculiar spots – probably from coffee spills, or, Nema strangely thought, left-over traces from the recording of some pornographic film, for he could still not let go of that warped image of Tatsuro as an actor in pornography – and along one of the walls was a book case overflowing with volumes on evolutionary biology and a particularly voluminous collection of colossal tomes on reptiles and fishes. Nema was using his forlorn backpack for a pillow upon which he gently rested – thankful it contained nothing sensitive, though the sharp edges of some old videotapes he found at home as he was leaving and decided to bring along for nostalgic values were rather uncomfortable – and between him and Junna nothing was said. They were both excited. 

Eventually the door swung open and the smiling face of Tatsuro appeared; with long striding steps he made his way to the black leather chair behind the desk and sat down, putting his legs onto the table, revealing his striped black and grey socks from which emerged a pungent odour he appeared to find enjoyable. He sat in silence for a while, humming some song played again and again on radio, doubtless sung by some girl with shrill undeveloped voice and bosom like a cow udder (Junna had told Nema much of this habit to like anything sung by girls with pretty faces and big breasts), but he finally looked at Junna and Nema and struck up conversation. 

“How’s your mother Junna? Still popping those quite potent painkillers she was prescribed for her back? It’s so typical of women to as soon as they are given some responsibility start hallucinating about some back-aches. They should be happy it isn’t like in the good old times when all a woman was for was having offspring and making coffee and preparing breakfast sandwiches and caring for the brood.”

“Well, she went to the hospital and they had to do some surgery…” Junna said, rolling his eyes, cheeks a bit red with embarrassment, for he liked not the thought of Nema hearing his uncles’ tired old sexist tirades. Nema looked at him with a baffled expression, but said nothing. 

“Figures you’d take the women’s position on this issue, seeing as you both have long hair and dress weirdly, like you were gay or something. You never participated in the extra-curricular sports activities, Junna, that’s why you don’t understand this sort of thing; you haven’t experienced the baseball club’s coach forcing you to play with a team made up almost to the half by girls which made you lose a game against some class of half-disabled runts from Shizouka.”

Junna sighed disapprovingly. “I know you have trouble getting over that little thing, but we aren’t your therapists, we aren’t here to discuss your oh-so-troublesome childhood.” 

“I know why you are here,” Tatsuro rambled on, “but so what? I want to know how you’re doing Junna, I’m concerned about you being in this no-good music project and I know how you always eye Nema when he’s not watching, remember when you told me about how you—”

“Don’t go down that road now,” Junna exclaimed with a sense of urgency, but the hint was clear to Nema, though he kept his mouth shut. This dispute was obviously between Junna and his unpleasant uncle. Instead he tried to focus on the two ferns in flower pots by the office window, wondering for a split second if they were real or made of plastic. Unavoidably he could not isolate himself from the raging discussion.

“Fine, I’m just trying to do you a favour anyway. But I sure as hell hope you use protection.”

Nema and Junna looked at one another once more, and it struck Nema as amazing that this loud, boorish and unpleasant man, who looked like a greasy actor in a cheap pornographic flick or an aged leader of some delinquent youth gang with the thuggish crew-cut hair and the hideously malformed goatee, and those eyes, playful, joking, but with a hint of something sinister, a strange deep, dark and uncharted, radiating an air of the unpredictable and unstable, was related to Junna, who was reliable, kind and always gentle and tactful, at least to Nema. 

Junna’s face was red with embarrassment, but the supposed revelation was really nothing of the sort, and he wished he could tell Junna this, but alas, the immediate situation did not allow for such, and they were not here for relationship counselling. 

“Do I sense an understanding between the two of you?” Tatsuro said, cutting the silence like a butcher cutting ham at a convenience store deli counter. 

“Who cares, we’re here to talk about that animal, nothing else,” Junna said, valiantly (but vainly) trying to defend himself and turn the discussion to the real issue at hand.

Tatsuro said nothing immediately in response. He simply sunk down in his chair, took the feet of the table and with smile widening like an infected wound whose stitches had fallen out he sat as if possessing some secret knowledge. 

Nema finally spoke up. “So what is this creature then? You look like you know something.”

“Why yes, I do!” Tatsuro said, quite loudly and with uncanny excitement. “But it’s not related to your little animal. But maybe that is a more giving topic to discuss. It sure is odd, that’s about all that I know for certain about it. How did you come across this animal, if we may be so bold as to assume it indeed it something we could think of as an animal and assuming it’s not some prank you are playing on me, or that someone is playing on all of us.”

Nema thought for a while about what to answer. He tried to collect the fragments, the scattered pieces of memories in his head, so that he could present them coherently. “Do you know about the meteorite that came down two days ago?”

Tatsuro nodded, for he had heard about it. And Nema explained the story, of how he, curious after seeing the rock pass through the atmosphere, at least a fragment of which appeared to land up in the woods on the hillside, went up to have a little look-and-see. And he did see, did he ever; he told of the place of entry, of the smoking crater-formation and of the rock with its frightening sharp and uneven forms, and how he had encountered the creature lying dead on his way back. He mentioned the burned woods around the place, and the police tape.

“I know why that was there,” Tatsuro said as Nema had touched on the issue, “it was some police man who, during the night, received a call to investigate a reported fire in the forest up there. It was reported on in the Tsukuba Shimbun. They didn’t say, or didn’t know, exactly what happened but apparently he fell down into the fire and died from the wounds caused by the fire. You know how clumsy police can be.” Slight laughter from his ever-smiling mouth. Nothing seemed to really bother him. Nema reckoned Tatsuro’s life philosophy might have something to do with laughing at everything and hoping that whatever it is that might come and haunt him, it will be frightened by his apparent madness. 

Junna interjected: “So you don’t know what the hell it is?”

“In so few words, yes” Tatsuro replied. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I have never seen anything like this thing. It’s… baffling, it’s like nothing I know of, and I’m a pretty bright guy.”

Nema would disagree with that assertion, but saw no reason to argue, and it was possible that at least as far as the creature’s biology was concerned, Tatsuro was in fact speaking with some authority, and did indeed have some knowledge; he doubted he would have been able to stay here at the university for long if he did not possess some positive aspects to redeem the failings of his despicable personality. 

Tatsuro sat up in his chair. “Look,” he said, “I can’t tell you with any certainty what it is, but we can make some assumptions: it has enormous teeth, there’s flesh in the stomach, ergo it is a carnivorous creature; it has an outward appearance that resembles, inasmuch as general body plan is concerned, a hedgehog, though it’s colouration is slightly lighter and the spines are varying hues of brown-green rather then the typical gold-brown and black as seen on typical European hedgehogs. The skin, which in general is not visible unless you look closely between the spines, differs verily: instead of the black leathery hide of your common hedgehog – of which no species, by the way, occurs hereabouts – you have this unpleasant sickly yellow surface covered with transparent mucus. The spines themselves are also quite different and appear to be extensions of the creature’s skeletal structure, which is quite unlike anything I have ever seen. I guess you can call it the meat-eating hedgehog if you like, or Erinaceus carnivorous, if you want it in Latin; I for one prefer the latter, sounds more professional when you use that one.”

“Where did it come from?” Junna probed persistently.

“How should I know? It can be your mother’s lover for all I know. Seems like the type. Or from out of the ground when that rock struck the ground.”  
“What if it was on it, like a stowaway, there’s always those strange water creature’s that travel around the world on the hull of ships, right?” 

“That’s very unlikely,” Tatsuro exclaimed, “if not downright preposterous! The heat on that rock as it comes into the atmosphere of earth would be far too great for any living thing to survive. Any substantial organism, at least, maybe bacteria or something could survive. And not just that, but there’s also the severe shock of the impact itself to consider, it’d make the most horrific high-speed aeroplane crash look like a piss in the Amazon River. And how would it survive out in space, it’s near vacuum out there, and cold as fuck for the most part, and then after endless cold it would encounter this enormous heat and then the blast of the impact? Absurd. Nothing could survive that sort of heavy-handed treatment.”

Junna resigned in the face of Tatsuro’s authoritative presentation and debunking of his speculation. 

“I agree with Tatsuro,” said Nema, “it’s not likely to have come down with the rock. There was a considerable upheaval of ground around the site where the meteorite hit the ground, maybe it came from there. Maybe it’s just been… well-preserved, I heard of a frog being stuck in a rock for hundreds of years once, and hopping out alive.”

Tatsuro was not pleased with the last claim. He shook his head as Nema spoke. “That’s a load of hogwash, utter nonsense! If it was caught in a rock it must surely have been stratified at least by the mineral flows to be preserved, and nothing can survive that. And this animal was fresh. It must have died recently. The lack of blood is quite strange, but it is feasible it has been scavenged by some birds or other animal, the state of the body doesn’t really allow any deeper study into that as you might imagine, but the flesh in the stomach that we found had not yet begun to rot. It cannot have been consumed more than some hours before you found it, Nema.”

“What do you think it is, the flesh that is?” Nema asked out aloud, hardly even aware he had done so. It was more of a question expressed by his internal dialogue. 

“No clue; looks mammalian though. Some wild game perhaps. Might have encountered some dead bodies from that little forest fire and had a feast. Seems it didn’t really know quite when to stop though, judging from that ruptured belly and all.” And once again, like so many times that day, Tatsuro laughed at his own tasteless joke, much to the dismay of Junna and Nema. 

“Anyway,” Tatsuro continued, “seeing as this must be some new species or some freakish mutation, I want you to go and look around the vicinity for more specimens. I myself cannot follow, but wait outside and I’ll give you some supplies and send some subordinate along to help you on your way.”

Junna looked a little annoyed by this demand that they participate in some rogue expedition trying to trap more of those damned monsters, but Nema found himself thinking it might be quite exciting, and thus looked at Junna and made a face he hoped he would understand as “let’s do it”, and it seemed to work, for Junna kept his objections to himself, but he still had one question, which he revealed after a few seconds’ thoughtful opening and closing of the mouth:

“Why can’t you come along?”

“Like you’d want that!” Tatsuro said. “Alas, as much as I’d like to say it is because I want to avoid infringing upon you and your friend here, it is not, it’s just that I have to write an essay about this little critter you brought, and in addition, I also have another paper to finish with a deadline no more than two days away, and my partner on that one has so far been very lazy and forced me to do most of the work. That’s why.”

Nema was perhaps more happy than even Junna that Tatsuro himself was not going to be joining them, but had his worries about this lab-assistant they were to be assigned. He hoped it would not be anyone like Tatsuro himself, some sexist creep doubtlessly acting in countless back-alley low-budget pornographic flicks.


	13. Chapter 13

There was a perpetual shadow at the narrow alley that provided access to the loading dock of the university biology department. The walls towered five stories up and had strange vertical lines spaced evenly over the wall to enhance the feeling of height, lines that when Nema looked closer, he realised were some sort of aluminium fixtures, it was quite typical of recently built structures; always some tasteless mockery of old architecture was to be found. Junna and Nema sat down on the cold loading dock, feet dangling over the pavement, which was still near-black asphalt; it could not have been paved very long ago. 

“Did what Tatsuro said there disturb you?” Junna eventually asked, his voice shaking slightly, as if he was worried.

“About the hedgehog-thing?” Nema replied. He knew that was not what Junna had actually been hinting at, but he said it all the same. Already but seconds after blurting it out, he was unsure of why he had said it. 

“No…” Junna said and looked up at the sky, visible as a blue rectangle with white specks from where they sat. At least the shadow of the place where they had been told to wait made the heat of the day more bearable. “I mean what he said about me… eyeing you, and whatnot.”

“But I already knew about that.”

“You did? How?”

“I noticed it. What I can’t understand is that you never noticed when I did it.”

Junna blushed, like a ripe fruit, a ripe fruit that Nema wanted to put his teeth in, figuratively speaking. But he did not. Nema did not know well what was expected of him, and how to act in this situation was a difficult thing to sort out. He zoned out, thoughts going circles, round and round, like a tumble drier from which words came at random intervals, not just words, but pictures, there was a picture of Junna standing in their shared kitchen last winter, wearing some sort of perverted Santa outfit, a dress to be specific, with quite the short skirt, and he was grinning hungrily – if it was because he was looking at Nema holding the camera or because he was holding two gingerbread hearts in his big warming left hand he did not know – and Nema assumed this recollection must have some relevance to the feelings between them. It had been like this for quite some time. Perhaps now, Nema reasoned, was not the right time to discuss anything of that kind, such revelation and catharsis would, Nema feared, have disastrous results and it might endanger the expedition, and, not to negate his feelings for Junna, but right now this expedition idea was much more exciting. Junna would still be around, but this was a passing opportunity. 

Upon that fell silence, and it seemed that Junna too spent the time contemplating whatever was bothering him.

 

“What the fuck are you guys doing here?” The exclamation, or perhaps it was rather a shout, out of surprise – Nema could not tell if it was good or bad – came from the door out to the loading dock, and Junna and Nema both got on their feet and looked over in the direction of said door, and there, between the stacks of anonymous cardboard boxes and yellow and orange plastic pallets, they both saw a familiar face; generically stylish black hair with red streaks of dye everywhere framed its long and round structure into which was set a pair of close, dark eyes - alluring and shapely at first glance, but hinting at unfathomable egotism, and something sinister - and a pretty mouth stuck in a near-perpetual smirk, which was not so pretty; it was none other than their former band mate Kiki.

“Kiki!” Junna exclaimed. Kiki looked at them, and he opened his mouth as if to say something, but shut it again. “Shouldn’t we be the ones asking you, what you are doing here?” Junna said instead. 

Kiki managed to collect himself. “Me,” he explained, though still his voice trembled with surprise and something that could have been distress, “I work and study here; what are you doing here? I was sent out here on some mission to assist in some field trip out to discover some strange creatures up near Chichibu.”

“It’s us you are looking for,” said Nema briefly as he tried to take command of the situation. The surprise evident in Kiki’s face became even more acute. 

“You?” he said. There was a hint of some distaste in his intonation. Kiki seemed to look at Junna, and then rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he said, “guess I have no choice.” Kiki jumped off the loading quay and walked over to a door next to a double garage port and with some stressed moves unlocked and vanished into said door. 

Nema looked at curiously at Junna, who looked slightly embarrassed. “What was that all about?” Nema asked.

“Nothing, just this one incident a long time ago…” Junna peered down into the concrete, following cracks like canyons through a rugged mountain plateau. He grinned, showing his large and uneven teeth, and then coughed emphatically, guiltily trying to change the subject to avoid any even more embarrassing revelation. 

“Incident?” queried Nema once more, “like what?”

“Let’s not go into that, it’s personal and not very relevant save that Kiki’s obviously still a bit upset about it.”

“Then it is relevant!” Nema asserted, “so, please, do tell.”

“No way!” said Junna, who was beginning to get annoyed at the insistence with which Nema clung to the question of tension between Junna and Kiki.

“It was just this one time event at a restroom after a show some two-two and a half years ago or so, and he was kind of angry about how it ended.”

Nema’s jaw opened and closed like that of a fish in a stagnant lake forcing water through the gills, and he looked at Junna with some irritation, for he realised now what it was all about. Kiki had left the band soon after an altercation in a restroom with what he had called a “vicious beast” that had savaged his genitals in quite the uncomfortable fashion. Kiki had been gone for a week – and when he came back he had said he would have to quit the band, saying he had “family obligations” and had to “continue with his education”. 

Nema realised now what must have taken place, and he was surprised. Never had he fancied that sort of thing, never had he been able to pick up any hints thereof before! There was an uncomfortable silence at the loading dock, challenged only by the noise of someone shuffling crates and boxes in the garage, until finally Junna sighed and spoke.

“You can’t be angry with me now, too, this was a long time ago, and I was stressed and what not, and I couldn’t help myself, don’t be angry now Nema…”

“I’m not angry,” said Nema calmly, “but I must admit I am quite surprised.”

The garage door flung open with a thunderous roar and out reversed a cab-over pick-up truck of the commercial minibus variety with Kiki at the wheels. He parked it up by the loading dock and in silence walked out and closed the garage door and locked up, after which he walked over to Nema and Junna. “Are you coming or what? Nema, you can sit up front.” This time, it was Junna who rolled his eyes. 

 

In the van going down the Ken-O Expressway towards Chichibu, there was an awkward silence. The sound of the wheels against the recently paved road surface was like the buzzing of bees. Nema looked back towards Junna and saw him stare towards the mountains rising to the north with a dreamy expression, surely wishing he was somewhere else. 

Then Kiki broke the silence. “So” he said and looked towards Nema for a split second before returning his stare to the near empty road ahead, “how are things going for you guys?”

“With what exactly? The band? Same as always. I guess we’re going nowhere but that doesn’t really bother me.”

Kiki sighed. “You’ll never learn, will you? What have you done with your life? You can’t continue chasing vain dreams like that. Time’s running away, you know, and you’re still at the same spot you were five years ago.”

Nema looked at Kiki, whose eyes as far as he could tell told of slight contempt and irritation. “And you’re doing so well, running errands for the staffers at the university?”

“It’s what you have to do to get forward in life. Sometimes you have to just accept things you don’t like for your own sake. It’ll pay off in the end.”  
“Sounds quite idealist, if you ask me.”

“You think? Well, that’s the sort of answer I expect from you. You’ve always been a bit odd and obstinate; it’s why I never discussed my decision to leave the band with you. You’d only try to talk me out of it and hold me back by insisting I had some sort of responsibility to the band, when in reality my only responsibility is to myself and I can’t fulfil my needs by being a lowly independent amateur guitarist. I needed to move on. I realised this during that restroom encounter and subsequent trip to the hospital; if this is what my friends do for me, what worth are they really?”

“You’ve sure disappeared up your own arse,” Nema said frankly and turned his eyes towards the mountains towering up ahead to the west, in the direction of Chichibu.

Kiki sighed deeply and grunted something about responsibility but Nema did no longer listen. There was no longer any doubt: Kiki was no longer who he had been when he had been in the band. He had changed. Something was different. Maybe the change came when his mother died and his father asked him to come back to the village to take care of things and pick up his old belongings and sort out some affairs. His father had not been well, and was set to move into a nursing home; it was then that Kiki decided he would leave the band and go back to school. The day he walked out of the former parking garage they had been using for the longest time as a cheap place for rehearsal and practice was the last any of the four remaining members had heard of him. Until now. He had vomited forth a few awkward farewells and opened the door, and the setting autumn sun dyed the clouds in the sky blood-red with strands of glowing yellow, and a silhouette against this apocalyptic dusk he vanished, and when the heavy metal door slammed shut, none of them really cared anymore if they ever saw him again. There had been a hint of resentment in his last statements, as if he was blaming them for what he considered a waste of his life, for time he could never get back. 

The mountains were getting closer.


	14. Chapter 14

With his head dulled by the nonsensical chatter of advertisements and insipid music devoid of any quality and potential for enjoyment whatsoever from the radio, Yuze commandeered his rusty car up the narrow road that wound its way up the mountain toward the destination; the observatory that crowned the top of one the steep crags on the near-desolate north-western slope of Mt. Shirogane, north-east of Takasaki city. The north-western slopes were almost entirely devoid of civilisation, being part of a natural reserve; a vast untouched forested wilderness only here and there penetrated by narrow roads such as the one Yuze was now heading up, which was rarely used by anyone except the employees of the observatory and maintenance workers visiting the radar transmitter next to it. 

After parking the old trusty car on the gravel parking lot outside the white building with its dome radiating a certain semblance of a gargantuan snail-shell and getting out, he enjoyed a deep breath of the fresh mountain air which pleasantly purged his head of the profane abominations of commercial radio. The air was fresh this far up, and a pair of influenza factories flew by, black birds; Yuze reflected that surely in some culture somewhere in the world, that must be regarded as an ill omen. 

Through the glass door he walked, through a brightly lit office where in the wind of the air conditioning unit flailed the green arms of numerous plastic ferns lined up along the windows. It was quite the unusual sight, but it was exactly the sort of thing Yuze expected of Yayoi, the friend he was here to see. Though he had been at this place before some year prior, he remembered little – the place was so dull and there was a certain lack of landmarks in most of the long corridors that radiated from the entrance hall. There were no signs or information available at first glances, but eventually he decided to walk down the corridor to the left, which ended at a door on which was plastered a star-map. 

He was not the epitome of respectability; indeed he looked more like a member of some strange youth-centred sub-culture at the moment, donning a pleasant black dress which he had worn when he played in a band – he felt nostalgic at the thought – and a pair of high-heeled boots, for these were the only clothes he had left. Most of the rest had either started falling apart at seams and indeed other places too, or he had sold them on the Internet, hoping to get enough money to pay his rent. Even his underwear. Still, he had been forced to move soon thereafter, to a small flat in a public housing block in Tama-shi, where the residents just above him played dreadful rap-music at all hours of the day and night, and those in the flat next to his never stopped their arguing except when one of them went to work. 

But things could be worse. The UFO-related work generally brought in enough money to get by, but at the end of the month there was really nothing left at all. 

Well past the door he came into a darker room where the only source of light was from table-top lamp in the far corner of the vast space, in the middle of which, on a raised platform, was the telescope. There stood the man he was looking for, with flashlight in his mouth, peering into the telescope machinery via an access panel, seemingly oblivious to all, even the clicking of Yuze’s heels. Yuze made no effort of being quiet, but the man was spooked when tapped on the shoulder. He dropped his flashlight and cursed with surprise. 

“Fuck that scared me,” Yayoi said and brushed his hair, dyed what looked like blood-red, out of his face. “Can’t you knock like normal people?”

“Where’s the fun in that?” said Yuze. “I can’t imagine you would have noticed. It’s nice to see you, too.”

Yayoi rolled his eyes as if he had no time for such customary niceties.

“I mean,” Yuze continued, “it’s been a while since we last spoke. A week, almost. You don’t call as often as you used to.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been busy with this piece of shit here. I’ve had to order new lenses and I’ve been trying to get them installed. I called to get an engineer here but they were reluctant to send one, said one wouldn’t come until the coming Wednesday, so I’ve been trying vainly to fix it myself.”  
“I see. So you haven’t had it up and running then? So you didn’t see the bolide the other day?”

Yayoi laughed loud and obnoxiously. “Of course I saw it! How could I miss it! You didn’t really need a telescope to see that thing.”

“Good. I need some information regarding that object.”

“Like what?”

“Such as where it went and where it came from.”

Amused by being asked questions of a professional nature rather than the usual questions he got from Yuze, which often revolved around attempts to probe for information of Yayoi’s sexual adventures, Yayoi walked away from the telescope to the worn wooden table, covered with scribbled-down numbers of some kind, and got the computer to return from a screen saver featuring a poorly animated comet. 

“I can’t tell you where from it came,” he said. “Its trajectory was quite unstable by the time it was registered by any equipment anywhere, so it’s a huge pain in the arse to calculate that. It seems it must have come from beyond our solar system however, there was some discussion of origin in the Oort cloud, but it’s all very hazy.” He clicked around folders and some image database, a long list of dates. Yuze got a glimpse of something familiar. August 20, 02:21:07. 

Satellite imagery, overlay of geographical outlines. Yayoi zoomed in; a light trail, like a pile of flour blown into a line by the wind, became visible at the centre. Some more touches of the mouse and the time slowly progressed, and revealed the objects break-up into several pieces beginning at 02:21:27, soon after which each fragment grew fainter and had begun taking different courses, probably because of their shape affecting air resistance. 

“You probably know where the third fragment ended up, it was the one reported by the news: ended up on some farm near that gravel pit in Takezawa. The second smaller fragment most likely did never reach ground but was evaporated in the atmosphere. The third, slightly larger fragment went further and probably hit the ground somewhere on the hills in central Chichibu District, somewhere between Chichibu City and Ogano Town.”

“Do you think it went all the way down?”

“There were some reports about a fire that burned for about three hours. Apparently a badly scorched body was found at the site. It was mentioned on television.”

Yuze didn’t have a television set. Needed too much electricity, and wasn’t as important as the computer; he could do all he needed there, so he had sold the television he previously had. He wondered a bit how that fire had started, had the space rock been what ignited it? 

“Bring a map and come with me,” said Yuze and looked at Yayoi. “We’ll have to do some field investigation.”

“Why do I have to come?” Yayoi whined. 

“I want company, you have nothing better to do, you must know you won’t be able to sort that telescope out today, so, you come with me. We have to go to that farm first and take some pictures of the damage for the report and look over things, and then we’ll have to see if we can find the place where that other fragment touched down.”

Touched down. Yuze smiled at his own use of words; a choice that conjured up images of either dull sports involving running and balls on the one hand and a generic pop-culture image on the other, that of a flying saucer landing on a road before a car that suddenly stopped working for no evident reason, after which a door opens up and out rolls a little flight of stairs and the little grey men—the imagery was very amusing.


	15. Chapter 15

The farm was at the end of a very narrow gravel path that went in a straight line from the nearest road; there was a partially paved space, large enough for a car to turn around in, and space for a few cars or whatever vehicles to park as well. Around this cul-de-sac of sorts were the farm-houses arranged in the shape of an U: a house that no doubt was the primary home was the primary focus, next to it an open garden with a greenhouse, on another side a storage building outside of which stood a rusty tractor, and on the opposite side, a farm building housing cattle, in which space was being prepared for a new garage. Around this were fields where maize and rapeseed grew, moving in waves at the whims of the wind. There was no sign of anyone being home. It was silent as they got out of the car. 

The garage port which had just been installed in the farm-building was open. Yuze nodded in the direction thereof, suggesting they’d have a look around. Yayoi, intentionally going about his business slowly just to make a point of being a bit annoyed with having been dragged out into the middle of nowhere – figuratively speaking of course, there were several houses not too far away – brought out the camera from the backseat. 

Yuze was the first through the garage port. There was a hole in the thin sheet metal roof, and the wall nearby, just below, had been slightly buckled; there was also something of a crater in the concrete foundation at the site. Small cracked blocks of concrete had been split and hewn from the hole, wherein still lay untouched the remains of what Yuze assumed was the meteorite: cracked and split into a hundred tiny fragments, red like Martian sand with specks of grey and white segments with strange wavy black lines. 

A wooden enclosure had been wrecked by the events, inside of which lay a grotesque pile that made him think of a primitive tent made with animal hide draped over some wooden poles. He looked over at Yayoi, who stopped and brought up the camera into a good position as he noticed the mangled carcass. It smelled horribly. Yuze was visibly disgusted.

“It’s not the nicest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Yayoi, “but there’s a certain cuteness to those empty eye-sockets.”

Cuteness, Yuze thought, there was no cuteness in the appearances of this rotten thing. Flies were scurrying about on top of it. There could not be much flesh left for them to eat, for it was picked quite clean. The skull was visible, but some darkening flesh was still visible on parts of it, and some of the tongue was left, hanging out of the mouth like a sausage someone had taken a big bite out of. There were dark stains on the floor from where the cow had bled, but there was nothing more than that, whatever creature had perpetrated this abhorrent attack had been quite meticulous in terms of lapping up blood, eating all the internal organs as well as the fat and flesh, all in all there was something horrific about the whole ordeal… eaten to the bones by some unseen, unknown assailant. 

“What could have done this?” Yuze wondered, speaking aloud though he did not realise it. 

“Dogs,” said Yayoi. “Feral dogs. Vicious bastards, they are. Or some pack of feral cats. Who knows? How many times have feral dogs following in the tracks of human habitation driven some species to extinction? Countless times…” His speaking trailed off into silent remembrance for the many now extinct animals on earth. 

Yuze wondered where all the other animals where. The newspaper article had mentioned two dead cows. Only one was to be found. It probably had been taken away for investigation somewhere else, and the surviving animals might have been moved for concerns of some infection—and on that thought, Yuze was seized by a horrible fright. Perhaps the white gas mentioned by the farmer in the interview had been some extraterrestrial gas that spread disease. It was something he had read about regarding the many pandemics of plague in Europe during the early half of the last millennium, which some not entirely trustworthy scientists on the fringe had suggested came from space via meteorites. It was more or less a variation of the old panspermia theory, the idea that life on earth came here as unsuspecting passengers on meteorites. 

 

After taking a few photographs of the bizarre skeleton and the other traces, Yayoi walked out of the garage without saying anything to Yuze, and started walking towards the house. Yuze scurried after him. “We should check if there’s anyone home,” Yayoi said, “they might not like us snooping around their farm house and garage without saying anything, maybe they’ll get angry.”

The house was quite small. There was a small plantation on either side of the small walkway that led up to the small wooden porch on which was stacked a half-dozen heavy bags containing fertiliser. Towards the porch was the front door, a plain wooden affair with some poorly executed drawing, probably done by a child, hung on a small nail; the door itself it was slightly ajar, but no sign of life came from inside.

“Maybe they forgot to close up properly before they left,” Yayoi speculated. “I doubt they’d much fear any break-in around here. Let’s have a look around inside.”

“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” Yuze had a somewhat worried expression upon his face. “They might come home and fancy we are thieves or something, or see us from some distance and call in the cops.”

Yayoi shrugged. “If that happens, we’ll deal with it, I can’t imagine it being very hard to convince the police of our good and honest intentions. Not to mention that the door was open, so we assumed they were home and wanted to talk to them. Come on now, don’t be so shy.”

Yuze rolled his eyes and followed Yayoi as he walked into the hall. Immediately inside, there were a few boxes standing around the wall with labels such as TOYS, CLOTHES, FOODSTUFF - clearly someone was packing up to move. A few shoes and outwear hung from a coat hanger to the side. Ahead, a steep stair went up to the second floor. To the left was the kitchen. Yayoi asked out aloud if anyone was home, but there were no answers. In the kitchen two cups of coffee stood and the chairs had been moved out, as though someone had gotten off them in a hurry. The door to a bathroom stood wide-open with the water from the tap flowing. 

“They sure seem to have left in a hurry,” Yuze commented, suspecting something unusual must have spooked them. “Maybe they had read too much about extraterrestrial visitations.”

Yayoi looked amused. “Maybe they were… abducted.” Yuze laughed half-heartedly. There was something which prevented him from taking it the way he would have under normal circumstances. The house was like a crypt, an eerie funeral home; a strange restlessness made itself known. Something was not right here. 

 

Upstairs closet doors were open and clothes and other textiles had been thrown on the floor. Wading through the mess they stumbled into what must have been the children’s room – a bunk bed, horribly untalented drawings: incoherent lines going all directions, scribbled with colourful crayons and looking like something belonging in a modern art museum, and a poster of some repulsive pop-singer with teeth as even as newly laid railway sleepers. There were no signs of disturbances in the room, it was placid, innocent, and for a while the uneasiness Yuze had experienced in the rest of the house was as if blown away by a gentle reinvigorating breeze. Yayoi quickly turned his attention elsewhere, but Yuze found himself sitting down on the soft white leather chair that faced a cluttered desk. A plastic bee and a cuddly toy in the shape of a big white seal near a meter long were the most notable features of the desktop landscape, which primarily seemed to consist of old pop-science magazines and a lot of bad drawings of prehistoric animals and inexplicable war-scenes where people in the shapes of little more than lines and black blobs were being torn into pieces tied together still by red irregular strokes by what must have been an attempt at rendering explosions, though it looked more like enormous orange pillows and dream-clouds. 

He was interrupted from his musings by Yayoi’s call from one of the other rooms on the second floor. He did not hear exactly what it was he shouted, but it was a demand, it was something he had to see, that much was made clear. Hurrying up and expecting there to be some trace of some sudden flight as in the rest of the house, what greeted him as he nearly stumbled on the high pile of beddings that had been dumped in the doorway was so bizarre and unexpected that he at first thought he was looking at a close up of a strange dish prepared in a television cooking show.   
Ketchup was all over the floor. Raw flesh hung in tatters from the white bone of uncooked ribs, exposing the white fatty tissues here and there. There were at least three people in the room, and the crimson fluid was spilled like the remains of a break-in into a wine cellar all over the floor: and from this red mess were the footprints of some rats or whatever that had feasted. This must have been the attack of some ferocious wild animal. Something very large, Yuze thought. Some of the bones were cracked in places. 

The pile of bones and flesh draped in blood sauce formed a grotesque pyramid in the centre of the room. The flash of the camera was reflected in the eye lost and lonely, connected to a cut of line that looked like electric wiring, in the ocean of red next to the family portrait on a chest of drawers as Yayoi made the bestial scene eternal. 

“I think we should probably call the police,” he said in an indifferent voice. Yuze wondered if that was enough. There was something unholy that had taken place here, a merciless slaughter at the hand of some unknown beast. He could not imagine a bear or something of that sort getting up all the way here, and regardless, the only thing that had got its feet covered with blood were those rats, whose traces ended at the carpet in the hallway towards the stair. The actual slaughter must have been fast, then, not to leave any bloody footprints. It was as if it been done by some daemonic machine. 

Yuze walked over to the telephone in the hallway, hung on the wall below a painting of a serene forested river-side landscape resting below a descending—or maybe it was ascending?—sun.


	16. Chapter 16

Nema looked at his mobile phone to see the time. It was just past six in the evening and the ominous dark clouds blowing in from the southeast were getting closer and had just succeeded in blotting out the sun. Kiki was poking the strange rock with a scorched black tree branch he found nearby, while Junna was sitting on the ground eating a sandwich, not appearing to be bothered by any of the madness that was going around. Nema was not happy with this encounter with Kiki, and his snide remarks in the minivan on the way here were neither forgotten nor forgiven. The approach of the clouds and the intermittent gusts of wind therewith associated had rendered the climate more pleasant than at any time during the last few days of dreaded heat, and Nema recalled school trips to the woods from—when was it? Second year of school, maybe third? 

A hand on his shoulder returned him to reality. 

“Enjoying some nostalgia again, are you?” It was Junna. Nema looked up at him. He guessed Junna knew him pretty well. There was a strange expression on Junna’s face. Nema was not sure how to interpret it. Maybe it was a sort of sadness that he could not see Nema’s thoughts, that he could not share the nostalgic recollections. Or something else, not sadness but a slight annoyance and disapproval; maybe he didn’t like the fact that Nema so much seemed to be caught up in the past; either would make sense, it might even be a combination of the two. Nema knew the past he seemed to think so fondly of now had never been very pleasant when it was the present, but somehow the fact that an ocean of time was between then and now made it… nicer, more enjoyable, easier to comprehend and most importantly, it made it more like fiction. Like stories in a book he could freely choose to interpret things and he did not face any difficult decisions. It was easier than the now, the always annoying and dreadful now, where reality was always in his face like a yelling old man angry to see children throwing rocks into the water from the cliffs on his beloved property. 

“What’s he doing?” Nema asked and looked over at Kiki, who now was prodding with his charcoal black twig through some ferns that had escaped the fire unscathed. 

“Hell if I know,” Junna replied. “Looking for something, I guess. Traces, maybe, something scientific, but probably, knowing what Kiki used to be like, he really doesn’t know what to look for anyway, but he likes to keep doing things so that he looks occupied. Like he has some purpose; even though he is as lost as a child left alone in a shopping centre.”

Nema smiled and rose up from the ground where he had been sitting on a plastic bag he fished up out of one of his pockets. Something was stuck to his weathered trousers. 

“What’s that…,” Junna said and stopped Nema from trying to turn around, and with his fingers removed the white object. It looked like a thin needle-like object, white with either end swollen into what looked like a tiny club which appeared discoloured: a sickly brown, like decaying flowers and leaves. Nema looked down and saw that, hidden underneath the burned remains of flowers and bushes lay the skeleton of an animal. There was no doubt that it was an animal of the same kind they had dissected with Tatsuro earlier, and though it was covered by some burned remains, the skeleton was clean, revealing no indications of being damaged by fire. It must have died after the impact and the fire.

“Hey,” said Junna hoping to catch Kiki’s attention, “there’s something here you might want to look at.” 

Kiki sighed theatrically as he walked over cautiously, as if guarding himself for a bad joke. “What is it?”

“I think it’s one of those things,” said Junna. Nema nodded. 

Kiki crouched and had a look, brushing aside the burned flowers, leaves and mutilated remains of bushes to expose the skeleton fully. Some tendons and other tissue still clung to some of the bones, particularly to the spine. It appeared to be thin and simple and hollowed. Kiki let his fingers capture some of the fragments which formed part of the skeletal structure of the creature’s legs. The creature’s structure was very different from what he was used to, apart from the existence of a spine. Bone-like in appearance, but apparently soft and remarkably flexible, tissue connected the legs with a strange enlarged ball-shaped vertebra, of which there were three; two where each pair of leg connected, and another where the neck connected to the central spine, which seemed to form separate structures. The head consisted of a simple flat disc with two hollow protrusions, probably for the eyes; along the edge of the underside of the disc was a thicker part, which must have been the upper jaw, for from it protruded the fierce needle-like teeth in large numbers. The lower jaw seemed to be missing; at least Kiki’s fleeting glances attempting to locate it proved fruitless. 

“It sure is a strange fucking thing, this,” Kiki said as he was fondling parts of the legs in his hands. Though the structure appeared thin and fragile, here and there hollowed in a manner that made Nema think of the way that space rock itself was hollowed out, like the corroded appearance of antediluvian volcanoes in harsh climates, the skeletal composition proved impossible to break. Kiki tried his best, taking a short little fragment he found lying free on the ground, to bend and break it, and although it would bent slightly, it would not break. 

Kiki cursed and put the thing down. 

He then sat down on the ground and put his hand down for support, but suddenly began screaming in a shrill voice unlike anything Nema and Junna had ever heard spring from his lungs before. It all happened very fast. The creature, a brown blotch on the black wasteland landscape, was making its way up Kiki’s arm at an astonishing pace, leaving behind a deep cut; a fault line rupturing with walls of flesh red and wet, blood in a river down to the ground; and when Kiki in tremendous fear pulled his arm up as fast as it could, it was already too late; for the thing was attached like a leech or a tick. Screaming, crying, tears and shout mixed up into one, he tried for one last hope, and reached with his hand to remove that thing which was now almost all red from the shower in Kiki’s blood, but succeeded only in getting pierced on the erect spines of that loathsome thing.

Nema and Junna were too horrified, too shocked – nor did it help the situation any that they felt a great resentment of what Kiki had become – to do anything but watch how that thing, so small and natural from a far, but so monstrous and murderous up close, ate away at Kiki’s arm, until strands of flesh and hide hung loose in flaps like the peeling from a blood-orange, draping the black leaves in scarlet ribbons. The thing on his arm, after not much remained thereof and Kiki lay prostrate in total stillness and silence, seemed to have gotten its fill and let go, rolling like a fat copulating whale to the side and down the few centimetres to the ground. Upon impact its noticeably bloated belly burst open and blood and flesh shot up in a macabre fountain almost a metre high. Nema found himself amazed at the thing’s stomach: how much it could fit into that little thing, and at what pressure must it have been to produce that sort of a burst? It had splattered all over the remains of Kiki, whose face was transfixed in an expression that seemed to embody both the hysterical laughter of a madman in a cell with padded walls and the utter inhuman terror and loathing conjured up by the unnameable horrors that reside in the darkest of gulfs. 

Nema turned his eyes from the desecrated corpse and towards Junna. His eyes were fixed on the thing and the red steaks of Kiki’s flesh, and his face was as pale as the winter moon. His mouth was opening and closing rapidly, as if desperately trying to form words to describe what they had just been privy to. Time elapsed, neither knew how long, and they just stood there and stared at the charred cadaver, before finally Junna managed to break the spell that had paralysed them. Nema’s eyes were either staring at Kiki or he was just dreaming himself away from the place when Junna put his hand around his arm and started pulling it in the direction of the road along which the van had been parked. 

“Come on,” said Junna, “we’ve got to get out of here; if there’s more of those little things around here they’ll eat us too in an instance.” 

Nema said nothing but offered no resistance and let himself be pulled away from the scene, though his eyes remained looking back at it all; the creature with its burst belly, and Kiki, and the blood, the copious amounts of blood, and he would have remained staring back were it not for the noise of trampling through the undergrowth by someone or something, the breaking of branches, that made him look in another direction. At first he expected to find a flock of the ferocious critters not-of-this-earth, but instead his eyes focused on two silhouettes that arduously made their way through the shrubs, one in particular of them seemed to struggle rather badly due to having shoes that were certainly not made for forest treks; thigh-high leather boots with heels very high, surely over ten centimetres. Both of the unknown persons approaching came out into the light; and they had hair that was almost as extravagant as his own and Junna’s; the one with the boots was wearing some worn black dress, the skirt of which seemed to be in tatters with pieces of torn leaves hanging in a few spots, and the hair was a light brown spiralling half-way down his torso, and the other was dressed more plainly in a worn T-shirt disgraced by some generic brand name logotype and a pair of oddly stained – probably with paint – black trousers, and his hair was a dark red, more vivid than the more natural red of Junna’s. The two slowed up when they noticed first the clearing caused by the fire and the impact, and furthermore when their eyes caught onto the presence of Nema and Junna, and lastly, they stopped dead in their tracks as their eyes surveyed the horrendously mutilated corpse of Kiki. 

“It looks like they’ve been as ravenous here,” said the one with the boots to the other. “It’s pretty clear they came with those rocks from space. How many of them could there have been on such a small rock, though?”

The one with the red hair did not say anything but seemed to take note of the surroundings until he seemed unable to contain his curiosity. “Hey, you there,” he said, aimed at Nema and Junna, “what happened here?”

“What does it look like?!” Junna shouted, “it ate him, those hedgehog things—” His voice crackled and evolved into sobbing and the sound of a stuffed nose desperately trying to clear the passages.


	17. Chapter 17

“Hedgehog things?” Yayoi asked out loud, not expecting any answers. He looked over towards the clearing scorched by fire and found in its midst the lipstick-red mark of a deadly kiss; a corpse with scarcely anything but skeleton left of one of the arms, and next to it a strange brown shape with a big gaping wound in the belly. Yuze saw it too, and he cautiously moved towards it. 

“There might be more of them!” one of the two fellows they had run into warned. “Or it might not be dead…,” his last word needlessly prolonged ended in a low whisper before fading into silence. 

The exposed underside of the creature was split open down the middle, and scraps of meat – presumably from the unlucky man that had been assaulted by the thing – hung out from the wound. It seemed to have eaten so much it had burst. The wound was very unpleasant too, and its appearance made Yuze think of a female reproductive organ, and at this thought he only barely managed to keep his stomach contents down and under control. 

So those were the things, he thought, the things whose traces they had seen so much of today. The little bastards that had some connection to the meteorite… maybe they came with it, or they were hidden underground somewhere and revived by the event. They were small creatures, not the sinister bear-like monstrosity he had imagined when he had seen the slaughter at the farmhouse. With his boots he poked cautiously the little thing, first just to test out if it was dead or not, and how much it weighed. It wasn’t very heavy, so with two further pushes he managed to turn it around on its belly. The back was covered in dark spines, and indeed, as the frightened young man had said, it looked almost like a hedgehog. Yuze had seen such many years ago at the Nogeyama Zoological Garden; though this creature was slightly larger than the innocent-looking hedgehogs that he had seen then, and its mouth contained bloodstained teeth so large that, had they been in the mouth of a normal hedgehog, it would surely have died of infection from the cuts they’d cause. This was something else entirely.

“What is it?” Yayoi asked, standing next to the two young boys - one of whose head was crowned by the most enchanting purple hair, he thought, before he got his instinct under control again – surely impatient with the waiting. 

“I don’t know,” Yuze said. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen, that’s for sure.”

“My Uncle,” the one with the reddish hair in two bunches began and tried to collect himself as best as he could, “he said it was unlike anything he had ever seen, I think the word he used was ‘utterly alien’, and this is the second one of those things we see, Nema here found another one yesterday. We took it to my uncle, and he investigated it and sent us out with Kiki to see if there were more of them.”

“Kiki?”

He nodded in the direction of the corpse, and Yuze made a grimace. “Poor bastard”, he said brusquely. “Anyway,” Yuze went on, “It's fortunate that we've stumbled on each other out here. My name is Yuze, and my partner over there is Yayoi. You've referred to the purple-haired one as Nema; what is your name?”

“I am called Junna,” he answered. “How is there any fortune in any of this?”

Yayoi butted in; “Well we were just held up by the police for a while, for questioning and all of that,” he said, “and it would be good if we had some evidence that we had nothing to do with the grisly murders we saw at the farmhouse... like Kiki there, for instance, and the probable suspect right beside him.”

Nema's big purple hair bounced; he looked like someone had hit him. “So the flesh was human--,” he said, making certain the final verdict was heard by all four present, “The red meat in the stomach of the specimen we took back to Tatsuro -- that was probably human flesh!”

“The little buggers, they're man-eaters,” Yuze echoed the conclusion dryly, and somehow this had more weight. “Perfect eating machines”, he added, mocking the conclusion of some vapid horror flick. 

“So what should we do?” Junna asked no one in particular.

“We're not tampering with the crime scene, that's for sure,” Yayoi replied. Yuze added, “We need to get back to the city and inform the police once we're there. Not here, because they might make us wait here again for questioning. You both came from Tokyo, right?”

Junna nodded. “We live there together,” Nema said. "Rent is expensive. We didn't exactly come here directly from there, but that's another story”, he pointed towards the van and continued, “That van isn't ours; we're borrowing it from what I presume is the university, and we can't leave it here, but our driver... he's dead—”

“You want us to give you a lift home?” Yuze asked. “We can do that; I live on the outskirts of the city and I'm not sure my small old car can even start on the round-trip.” Yayoi sighed but looked resigned to coming along wherever Yuze wanted to take him.

“Sure,” Nema said. “I'll give directions from the passenger seat.”

 

The sun had descended beyond the horizon as Yuze drove onto the quiet one-way road and prepared to come to a halt. A wind was playing with the crowns of the trees and blew a discarded plastic bag across the street before the car; the street lights had come on and illuminated the scene, and to their right towered the massive concrete structure of the building wherein Nema and Junna’s flat was to be found, building number five in the housing estate. Gallery walks lined each floor, those walks were illuminated radiantly, and one could see the countless doors to the flats with little number plates on each. 

The car stopped and Yuze turned back to his passengers, who were getting read to depart. Yayoi was asleep in the seat next to him.   
“What should we do about this whole thing?” Yuze asked. Nema and Junna looked at one another with a perplexed expression. 

“I suppose someone ought to alert the police and some authority to the matter,” Nema said. “We’ll probably call and alert Tatsuro, Junna’s uncle, at the university, he might give us a hand and levy support in case there was to be doubt as to the veracity of our claims.”

“Sounds good,” Yuze replied, “but the situation overall is looking rather dim, isn’t it?”

“How so?” Junna asked. 

“Those things seem to have already killed a number of people, and as far as we know they appeared – for whatever reason – only days ago. I wonder if its going to get worse. Imagine those things running amok all over. It could potentially be a serious threat.”

“Threat to what?”

“Human life as we know it. At least for us.”

“Isn’t that a assuming a bit too much, since we deal with a lot of unknown variables here?” Nema imparted. 

“Maybe,” Yuze admitted. “All I’m saying is that the possibility is there. We really don’t know. Anyway, Yayoi and I were told by the police that we met at that farmhouse earlier that we were to appear at the head office of the metropolitan police tomorrow, so we’ll do our best to inform them when we have that chance. You’ll deal with that scientist at the university?”

“Yes, as we said,” Nema responded. 

“Good. Try look through some information and see if you can find anything similar to this in the past or whatnot. It would be easier to form an opinion if we had more to go on, and some history to learn from; learning from history is always important.”

Nema nodded, and being the one that sat closest to the door, he was the one to swing it aside and step out. Junna followed in silence. Nema leaned back into the van. 

“We might want to reach one another—,” he said. 

Yuze shrugged as if surprised he hadn’t thought of that before. It had seemed almost natural that they would have been able to contact one another, as if by some telepathic link. “Of course,” he added. “I don’t have my phone with me right now”, he said, “but you can reach me at my home number, for the most part, or my mobile. Do you have yours with you?”

Nema retrieved his from his trousers, and Yuze noticed and told Nema his number, which Nema proceeded to write down in the sparsely populated phonebook with surprising seed if one was to consider that he was none too used to the ordeal of writing on the mobile phone. When this was done (and his thumb almost numb from the arduous button abuse), he bade his new acquaintance adieu and walked back up to Junna who waited patiently in silence halfway across the brick-laid square below the housing block. 

 

Sixteen stories the block rose from ground level; with more than 150 flats in all it was the largest of the blocks in the housing estate wherein they resided. Next to it were four smaller 10-story blocks as well as a pedestrianised shopping centre with various local stores and services, including the post office and a local police box. Tired as they were when they exited the lift at floor 11, where their flat was (number 11-5), they absentmindedly passed the offensive political poster advertising a local DPJ candidate without tearing it down as they usually did. Whoever put it up was tireless; how many times had they torn it down and thrown it down the rubbish chute? Several dozen… and yet, it was always back up before a week was over.   
Nema had the keys on him and unlocked the door, and after locking the door after them and taking off their shoes, Nema could hear how Junna bounced into bed almost immediately. Nema, too, was tired, but felt he had to check the answering machine on the telephone, after a short visit to the bathroom. 

The flat was a two room flat. There was a narrow hallway with a shoe stand, some hangers, and on the opposite wall a large floor-to-ceiling mirror about a metre wide. Next to the mirror was the door to the bathroom and opposite this a closet; further in from the closet an opening to the kitchen, and straight on the living room and general space, with a large window along the short wall next to a door opening up to a long narrow balcony. The walls were covered with wallpaper in warm colours, a warm orange colour in the living room that reminded Nema of some tropical fruit. The bathroom had freshly tiled walls and a combined bath- and shower with a pleasant toilet of china. The furniture was sparse (they were both poor, most of what they had in the way of furniture they had gotten from their parents and cheap garage sales they had taken an interest in visiting every now and then) and their computer (they had only one) was of an outdated model, as was their television set. They did not pay the television license, for they could not afford it. 

When Nema returned from the bathroom he immediately sat course for the telephone, which like so many other things was an antiquate model, a red plastic affair with humongous buttons they had purchased for an illegally small amount of money at a garage sale in Tama, it was amazing that it had such a modern feature as an answering machine, really. Nema let his long fingers flippantly play over the buttons and pressed the arrow-like play button. 

A drawn out signal followed by some clicking. Then the lone message. “Hey guys, this is Tatsuro, where the fuck are you? Where’s Kiki? Is he coming back or what? I need his services. Call me when you get back, getting a bit worried.” Then he had hung up. 

Nema brought up the handset and pushed the button to call back who left the message. 

Three signals passed, then four… then crackling before the familiar voice filled the silent nothingness. 

“I was wondering when the hell you guys would call”, Tatsuro said with irritation in his voice. 

“Sorry,” Nema said. “It took longer than we thought to get there and well, some things happened…”

“Things? I hope Kiki’s on his way back.”

“I’m afraid that might turn out to be difficult.”

“What? He’s still up there?”

“No. When we got there, we found a skeleton of one of those creatures. Kiki was enthralled by this find and didn’t notice that one of the creatures, alive, was coming around. It bit him. Killed him.”

“Killed him? This is some morbid joke of yours, isn’t it? I bet he followed you home, put him on.”

“No, I’m not kidding. It’s true. The thing was over him in seconds… gnawed through his arm… blood spraying everywhere, screaming and then… he fell silent, dead, we couldn’t do anything to stop it, we thought there might be more of the things…”

There followed a dreadful silence. 

“He’s really dead?”

“Really dead. The police have been informed. I imagine they might call us tomorrow.”

“Holy shit”, Tatsuro said. Cursed some to himself. He seemed to be excited at the same time as he was saddened by the news. “Those fucking creatures are really aggressive them, aren’t they?”

“They must be. We met some others there, two guys, who said something about that meteorite and how they had gone to this farmhouse somewhere not too far from Chichibu and found a family, torn to shreds, most of them consumed as far as I understood.”

“I wonder where they came from…” Tatsuro said, mostly to himself. “Amazing. Terrible and frightening, but fucking amazing.” He took a deep breath and Nema could hear it clearly over the wire. “I’ll speak to my superiors,” he added, “this is some remarkable discovery and it must be properly investigated and contained if necessary. I’ll try to see what I can do about the police; too, I imagine there must be some government agencies to inform, too. And while I remember it, I spoke to a colleague earlier, and he said something along the lines of ‘I heard about something similar once’, and spoke of a book that supposedly contained references to creatures similar to those we’re dealing with. Got pen and paper?”

Nema picked up a pen from the top of the chest of drawers he stood facing; already there was a mangled mess of papers, and on this he resolved to write. “Yes”, he said. 

“He said it was a book on the issue of old legends and myths and how they relate to traditions or some other mumbo-jumbo like that, written by some goofball called Asuyu Kakeru, presume that’s a taken name given how queer it sounds and all, but whatever, and it was supposedly well-referenced, to the source can’t speak of what the reference was to. It might provide you guys with some information on the issue, and I’ll probably be too busy to track this shit down myself, so if you find out anything of relevance, call me, right? I don’t want to repeat today’s lack of contact, Kiki was always such an arse when it came to using mobile phones. Said he didn’t want to because of government tracking him or something. Nonsense. You should give me your number and I’ll call in and see how it’s going sometime during the day tomorrow, okay?”

“Okay”, Nema said and proceeded to give Tatsuro the number to his mobile phone. 

“Good”, Tatsuro said after it was done. “I’ll get back to you then, see you.” Nema lodged some farewell phrase and the line went dead.


End file.
